Trippin' with Terry Southern: What I Think I Remember 9780786441143, 2009017989, 0786441143

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Trippin’ with Terry Southern

Trippin’ with Terry Southern What I Think I Remember GAIL GERBER with TOM LISANTI

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Gerber, Gail, ¡937– Trippin’ with Terry Southern : what I think I remember / Gail Gerber with Tom Lisanti. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-4114-3 softcover : 50# alkaline paper ¡. Southern, Terry. 2. Novelists, American—20th century— Biography. 3. Screenwriters—United States—Biography. 4. Gerber, Gail, 1937– I. Lisanti, Tom, 1961– II. Title. PS3569.O8Z45 2009 813'.54—dc22 [B] 2009017989 British Library cataloguing data are available ©2009 Gail Gerber. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. On the cover: Gail Gerber, 1966 (photograph by Camilla McGrath); background ©2009 Shutterstock Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

To Terry, who always said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”

Acknowledgments I am forever grateful to the following wonderful people who took the time and contributed anecdotes, and in some cases photographs, to my memoir: Si Litvinoff, David Amram, Chip Monck, Angelica Page Torn, Andrew Murray Scott, John Kim, Darius James, and Joe LoGuidice, who passed away as this book was going to press. I will miss him dearly. Special thanks also to Darius and Raul Ramos for some wonderful, insightful feedback, and to Aron Kincaid and Earl McGrath for the use of photographs from their collections. I also want to thank all my friends for their support and encouragement over the years: Priscilla and David Bowen, Kati Meister, Rip Torn and Amy Wright, Patsy LoGuidice, and Luke Zarzecki. Special thanks to John Kelly for giving us the subtitle. Who says accountants can’t be creative? And finally a heartfelt thank you to Ernie DeLia, Tom’s partner, whose apartment we took over every Saturday for over a year to write this book and who generously camped out in his den or ran errands while we scribbled away. All photographs are from Gail Gerber’s private collection unless otherwise noted.

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Table of Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Preface

1

1. The Loved Ones

3

2. A Straight Flush Beats a Full House Every Time

26

3. Paging Dr. Southern

45

4. Eastward Ho!

63

5. Uneasy Rider

88

6. Hippies, Yippies, and a Girl Named Candy

100

7. All Aboard the London/New York/Berkshires Express

112

8. Move Over, Eva Gabor—Farm Living Is the Life for Me

124

9. The IRS Blues

147

10. Hollywood Shuffle

162

11. New York, New York

180

12. That’s Prof. Southern to You!

208

13. A Grand Guy Comes to the End of the Road

244

Epilogue

255

Bibliography

259

Index

261

ix

Preface There are plenty of books, articles, and websites available to learn about Terry Southern’s early life and what his writings meant to a changing world during the Fifties and Sixties. And there are more knowledgeable people than me who can critique and philosophize what Terry was trying to accomplish. I have not set out to write a biography of him or a critical review of his work but a memoir of what it was like being with him for thirty years during the highs and the very lows. I’ve tried to provide a glimpse with stories and anecdotes, from me and some of the people who knew him, into what went on behind the satirical words that he produced. To reveal to the public that Terry Southern was more than “the hippest guy on the planet” but also a great, creative but flawed man who was so ahead of his time as evidenced in his writings; a carefree man who could hop on a plane without a dollar in his wallet or a care in the world; a determined man who would spend hour after hour writing away in his study; a poor businessman who never paid attention to financial details, to his everlasting regret; a sensitive man who would try to avoid the unpleasantness in his life as much as he could; a weak man who over-indulged in alcohol and who would never pass up a joint or line of cocaine; a social man who thrived on the cultural electricity of New York City but preferred a rural home life; and finally a devoted man who remained my companion for thirty years. By the time that I met Terry and me in New York, May 1994. Photograph Terry, he was an acclaimed by Camilla McGrath, courtesy Earl McGrath. 1

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Preface

writer in the tradition of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, having written numerous short stories and essays for such publications as the Paris Review and Esquire and three novels during his days living a Bohemian lifestyle in Paris and Greenwich Village. His first book was Flash and Filligree, a strange Henry Green–influenced novel; Green enjoyed it and befriended the young American writer. But it was the bawdy Candy, a satire of Candide, where a Midwestern cutie comes to Greenwich Village to “find herself,” that was a major bestseller but also deemed “pornographic” and was banned in the U.S. and England. This added a touch of notoriety to Terry’s hipster persona and he followed it up with the ahead-of-its-time The Magic Christian, his personal favorite, in which Guy Grand, a practical joker, wants to know just how far people will go to make a quick buck. Peter Sellers loved it so much he bought a hundred copies to give to friends. He sent one to director Stanley Kubrick, who then engaged Terry to co-write with him the satirical Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (1964). Terry was riding high off the success of this classic satire (it earned him an Academy Award nomination) when we first encountered one another.

1. The Loved Ones Hollywood, summer of 1964. I had been living in California for almost a year now and still felt like a fish out of water. Growing up in Canada where I studied ballet from the time I was a small child, I found Los Angeles mystifying with its palm trees, bright sunlight forever contrasting with the deep shade, and its superficial inhabitants. But I readily admit I was sort of a snob myself and didn’t know much about the actors or directors I came in contact with. Petite blondes like Sandra Dee were the reigning young actresses of the time but I couldn’t tell a Sandra Dee from a Tuesday Weld from a Connie Stevens. They were all one big yellow-haired blur to me. And forget about pop music; the minute the Beach Boys or Connie Francis would come on the radio, I’d reach for the dial in a mad rush so as not to hear their insipid songs. The dance and jazz worlds were where my interests and background lay. Arriving in town with my unwarranted bias and without knowing a soul, I had done pretty well for myself, or so I thought, in a short period of time. I had a leading role in a play and two featured movie roles albeit in teen-oriented B-movies, and had done a few guest TV shots. I knew it wasn’t solely my acting talent that was landing me roles. I was a pretty blonde with a figure that looked good in a bikini and wasn’t afraid to show it off, which helped me tremendously. It didn’t bother me a bit, unlike actresses whom I regularly came in contact with, who wanted to be known for their talent rather than their looks. In August 1964 I found myself back on the MGM lot, after working there previously in the Elvis Presley musical Girl Happy, auditioning for a cameo role as an airport information girl in a major production. I was very excited. The movie was The Loved One, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh and directed by Tony Richardson, who was the hot director at this time. Part of that British “New Wave” of directors in the late Fifties, Richardson directed such well-received movies as Look Back in Anger (1958), A Taste of Honey (1961), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and the bawdy hit comedy Tom Jones (1963). The Loved One was his second U.S. production. I interviewed with associate producer Neil Hartley, the boyfriend of Richardson who was bisexual though married to actress Vanessa Redgrave 3

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since 1962. Folks in Hollywood used to joke that Tony only wed Vanessa because he could fit into her clothes. It seemed that every aspiring young actress auditioned for the part but they gave it to platinum blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield, whose career was on the down slope. This didn’t help as her scene was left on the cutting room floor. As a sort of consolation for not getting that role, I was hired to appear as one of the decorative background cosmeticians working at the funeral parlor with the film’s leading lady, Anjanette Comer. Little did I know that this would forever change my life. The Loved One starred Robert Morse, who looked adorable with his shaggy Beatles haircut, as the young British poet Dennis Barlow, newly arrived in Hollywood to visit his upper crust uncle (John Gielgud) who shortly thereafter commits suicide when he is unceremoniously fired from the movie studio where he has worked for over thirty years. Barlow, in charge of the burial arrangements, is led by his uncle’s pompous friend (Robert Morley) to the ornate Whispering Glades funeral parlor, founded by the Blessed Reverend Glenworthy (Jonathan Winters). He falls in love with one of the cosmeticians, Aimee Thanatogenos (Comer), a strange girl who fantasizes about death and lives in a condemned house on stilts in the Hollywood Hills. Their blossoming romance is complicated by head embalmer Mr. Joyboy (Rod Steiger), a rival for the attention of Miss Thanatogenos, and by Barlow’s humiliating job at a pet cemetery, which he tries to keep a secret. When all the men in Aimee’s life let her down—Barlow’s occupation is revealed, Joyboy deserts her, Glenworthy proves to be a lecherous phony, and the Guru Brahmin (Lionel Stander), whom she writes to for advice, turns out to be a drunkard—she commits suicide by embalming herself. A number of actors make cameo appearances including James Coburn as a customs inspector, Tab Hunter as a tour guide, Roddy McDowall as a movie studio executive, Liberace as a coffin salesman and, most hilariously, Milton Berle and Margaret Leighton as a battling Beverly Hills couple whose dog has died. My scenes, set at Whispering Glades Funeral Parlor, took weeks to shoot. They were filmed in the extensive gardens and interiors of a lavish estate called Greystone located on Sunset Boulevard. It was the former residence of multimillionaire Edward Laurence Doheny II. I worked mainly with Anjanette Comer, Rod Steiger, and Pamela Curran. Anjanette never spoke to me or any of the other girls playing small roles. Since she had the leading role, I think she thought we were beneath her and not worth her time. She was also busy learning her lines. I remember doing nothing my first day on the set. On the second day it seemed it was going to be a repeat of the day before. I was sitting around

1. The Loved Ones

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earning more money than I ever did as a ballet dancer so I really couldn’t complain. There was a whole bunch of us getting paid just to show up. I was all decked out in the same costume as Anjanette, a tight, form-fitting white dress with a matching veil, but with absolutely nothing to do but sit and wait in the hot August sun. I spotted a chair in a shady, quiet spot and made a beeline for it, thinking I could pass the time over there. A crew guy saw my lightning move and said, “That one’s a dancer.” Terry Southern overheard and saw me. He came over and introduced himself as the film’s screenwriter. He was very slim at this time and was wearing his trademark dark sunglasses, with a cup of coffee in one hand and his script in the other. I thought, “Oh, great. Another old guy is hitting on me.” I had recently met the notorious author Henry Miller of Tropic of Cancer fame at an afternoon garden party thrown by a big-time producer of MGM musicals who also happened to be Canadian. Once Miller noticed me, he never left my side and insisted we have our picture taken together. I was initially flattered that a world-famous author would pay so much attention to me but then quickly realized that he was just a guy on the make. He insisted that I give him my phone number and address so he could take me out and I hesitantly gave them to him. I was reluctant because he was much older than I was but, as with most lecherous guys his age, they don’t consider themselves “old.” They just keep trying. When I ignored his phone calls, he pursued me by mail (I saved all his letters). Terry Southern, at forty years old, was much younger than Miller’s seventy-five. And to be honest, I was immediately attracted to Terry—no surprise there, as I seemed to have a penchant for older men. I accepted his invitation to go to his office for a drink. I guess I was destined to fall in with a bad crowd. Henry Miller and Terry Southern were chasing me—I never had a chance. Terry’s makeshift work space was in one of the mansion’s drawing rooms, and had a full bar. I went, and we talked. He seemed quite taken with me, and asked me a lot of questions about my life. I thought Terry was more interesting than most men I had met. I had read The Loved One years before, one cold winter in Toronto, and found it most enjoyable, and had seen Dr. Strangelove a few months earlier. He said he had a best seller out, and I coolly replied, “I don’t read best sellers.” The next morning he brought a copy of his book Candy for me. I took it home and read it that night. He wrote “I love you” in tiny script on the inside corner of the cover. It seemed a bit hasty. The next day we went to lunch at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel where he was staying. I was still in my Canadian version of what to wear, and showed up in a nice straw hat and white crochet gloves. Terry must have thought that was really weird but he kept his comments to himself. I

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learned that he spent a lot of time in Paris and New York City writing short fiction and non-fiction for the magazines Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, and Olympia Review, among others, and that besides Candy he authored the novels Flash and Filigree and The Magic Christian. Oh, and he also revealed that he had a wife. Seeing how that didn’t faze me (I was still legally married too), Terry invited me to his hotel room where, when he was not working on The Loved One, he was writing a screenplay for Candy. A lovely woman named Margo, who worked in the costume department on the film, came by after work to “freshen up.” They had obviously known each other for awhile, and had worked on pre-production together. Margo was surprised to find me there. It was a very awkward scene. After she had showered, she said to Terry, “I’m her dresser, I can’t compete with that” and quickly left. Terry said he had planned to work his way through all the beautiful women on the set, but got stuck at me. I learned from Terry that he just received an Academy Award nomination for co-writing Dr. Strangelove and he had been inundated with screenwriting offers. He chose to work with Christopher Isherwood in adapting and updating Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One because he loved satire, which was evident if you saw Dr. Strangelove. Terry talked very excitedly about his love of collaboration and felt this would be an interesting challenge poking fun at the Southern California funeral industry and Hollywood’s British “colony” of actors. Terry continued on, telling me that after arriving in Hollywood, he booked himself into the Beverly Hills Hotel. Tony Richardson, whom Terry called “Tip Top Tone” as he loved giving nicknames to people he liked, was hired by producer Martin Ransohoff of Filmways to direct The Loved One, which was going to be distributed by MGM. Terry and Isherwood wrote most of the screenplay at Richardson’s home while lounging around the swimming pool. Vanessa Redgrave was also there, and Tony sent Terry and her to do research at several funeral homes. They pretended to be a couple who had just lost a loved one. Redgrave really got into the part, weeping and wringing her hands at every funeral home, while Terry played the stalwart husband. Terry always said how impressed he was with her. After the script was completed, Isherwood returned to London. My journey to Terry Southern’s hotel room and the set of The Loved One began in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on October 4, 1937, the day I was born. My mother, Stephanie Swedesky, was a beautiful young woman, and my father William Gerber was a musician who had played the trumpet from the age of five. He soon went off to war with the rest of the men. Only Eloise at the Plaza had a more sophisticated childhood than I did. My mother took me to Vancouver in the early Forties when the war was raging. There were

1. The Loved Ones

7

blackouts, air raid sirens, and rationing. Vancouver was a pretty hip place at the time. During the Fifties, café society and nightclubs flourished, and the dance and theater world sent well-trained people to New York and London. I began taking ballet lessons at the age of seven, and was recruited from a ballet school to be a fairy in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While waiting in the wings to go on, I couldn’t figure out why the grownups talked normally until they went onstage where they spoke strangely. I liked the smell of sweat and greasepaint, and the warm lights on stage. My mother worked in a supper club, and after ballet class and rehearsals I would walk to the club and watch the shows from the lighting booth. I saw Sophie Tucker, the Ink Spots and many others from high above the stage after dancing all day to Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and many other fabulous composers. I would go out for dinner in Chinatown with my mother and her friends after they got off work at 2 A.M. My friends and I were dancing all over the city, and I worked every year in summer stock, in many shows which had roles for children (among them Song of Norway, Kiss Me Kate, and Carousel). Part of the chorus, I joined in singing “Bali Ha’i” in a production of South Pacific. I was always the youngest member of the cast. My father, after returning from World War II, often played in the orchestra pit where I was dancing, and he would give me a lift to the theater. I was almost nine years old at the end of the war, and had virtually grown up without men, except for the very young and the old. A number of enterprising women of that generation banded together for the six years of the war in Canada to work and raise their children, and would rent a big house with little or no furniture, and whoever wasn’t working would keep an eye on the children. The men all came marching back together. I was surprised how many there were. Despite being busy with school and ballet, I still found time to go to the movies. Though stars like Cary Grant, Robert Taylor, and Errol Flynn won the hearts of many a bobbysoxer, I adored Oscar Levant, Phil Harris, and Hoagy Carmichael, not a good sign of things to come for me. At thirteen I did the apartment hunting because my mother was not too practical, and I began contributing to pay the rent. My mother was highstrung, as they used to say—a combination of Hedy Lamarr and Blanche DuBois. Two families took me in while she was having nervous breakdowns, which was most of the time. It took a city, not a village, to raise me. School teachers, ballet instructors, and Mother’s friends all did what they could to help me. My parents had divorced after the war and my father married a woman more stable and less prone to nervous breakdowns than my mother. My ballet troupe traveled to festivals where we danced to symphony orchestras, and at fifteen I joined and became the youngest member of Les

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Grandes Ballets Canadiennes, based in Montreal. I left Vancouver and never looked back. I spent my sixteenth birthday in rehearsal. My friends rushed out at lunch and came back with delicious French pastry. We all lived in a big house and we would all go to gay bars together. It was just grand. Eventually I met a wonderful jazz musician named Maury Kaye. After dancing all day I would rush from rehearsal and meet him at the El Morocco, where he was the orchestra leader. Then we would go to an after hours club and I would listen to him and his combo jam till dawn. We married after a brief courtship. I turned Jewish to please his parents and studied all the books. I thought of it more as history than religion. I had a Mikvah and was given the name of Ruth, the Gentile in the Old Testament. The woman who prepared me for the Mikvah told me to keep my eyes open when I had to dunk under the water or I wouldn’t see with Jewish eyes. She then wrapped me in a sheet. I went into the room with the bath, waded in and crouched down. It was pretty murky down there. When I came up in this wet sheet, there were three rabbis standing there praying for me very intently. They were probably the only three rabbis in all of Catholic Montreal at the time! People married quite young then and I was a sophisticated nineteen-year-old, and Maury was twenty-five. We had a wedding in the Temple Emanuel, and a reception afterwards that had practically every musician, Jew, and ballet dancer in Montreal. I showed up wearing blue, oblivious to the fact that the bride is supposed to wear white. Maury came from a family of skiers so I know I would be sitting at the lodge by myself if I didn’t take up the sport. I was probably the only skiing ballet dancer in history. Somehow my ballet company director found out and, after I admitted to my ski weekends, he threatened to fire me. They had invested a lot of time and money and didn’t want to risk me getting injured on the slopes. I loved to ski so I still snuck out to the slopes once in awhile. Luckily, I never got hurt and became skilled enough to conquer most of the advanced trails though I never had the courage to try the Black Diamond. Maury and I had a good life, but we were “torn asunder” by notorious Scottish psychiatrist Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron who was running a program at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal with CIA funding to experiment with “mind control.” He had a hundred patients who came in for minor depression and were kept captive. Purportedly, he used techniques developed by the Nazis to erase the existing personalities of his patients. My husband unfortunately was one of them put under his care. The patients were treated like prisoners and even their families couldn’t get them out. Dr. Cameron had incredible power and CIA backing so no one could stop him. My husband was caught in this web. We parted on the advice of Dr. Cameron who said to me, “Get out of this relationship, young lady. You have

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a millstone around your neck.” I’m a city girl and didn’t know what a millstone was. I said I wanted to go to a family counselor. He got quite belligerent and insisted that I end the relationship. I cried all the way home. Feeling helpless, I left Maury after four years of marriage. I didn’t know what happened to my husband for decades. After I discovered that he had died, I discussed it with Terry. He said that some people have the ability to say, “You’re a dog and you believe you’re a dog.” I was told to leave—so I did. Looking back, Maury and I were both victims of this cruel doctor and the CIA. Leaving my husband and the ballet company behind, I relocated to Toronto where I was hired to dance on the TV series Music ’60 Presents the Hit Parade. It was produced by Norm Sedawie, whose previous show was the immensely popular Cross Canada Hit Parade. Music ’60 Presents ran from October 1959 to July 1960. Hosted by popular Canadian vocalists Wally Koster and Joyce Kahn, it featured renditions of not only pop music hits but rock ’n’ roll, jazz, and even classical. I was a part of the Hit Parade Dancers and Maggie St. Clair was our choreographer. Everyone on the show kept telling me that I should become an actress so I did. It seems like I always did what people told me to. I think that is because as a dancer I was trained to take direction and needed someone to guide me. On television, I was cast as “the girl” in a number of live Playhouse 90–type shows, Canadian-style. I remember working once with Frank Gorshin (who later became well known as an impersonator and for his role as The Riddler on Batman) in an episode called “Do Jerry Parker.” I enjoyed live television immensely because it was just like being on stage, which I loved. Even though I was over twenty-one and had a childhood far from normal, I was chosen to enact a typical adolescent in a CBC documentary called The Teenager. Scholar Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase “The medium is the message,” reported on how the youth culture was facilitating the shift in mass media from print to electronic media. It was true back in 1960 and so true today. I was also one of the last people to work with Smith and Dale, whose story was in part the inspiration for Neil Simon’s hit Broadway play and movie comedy The Sunshine Boys. They were headliners in burlesque, and comics Wayne and Schuster brought them up twice to Canada to appear on their variety show. I worked on the series as a dancer but I was picked to act with Smith and Dale in some of their classic sketches. They sat on opposite sides of the stage during rehearsal and didn’t speak much to each other. It was disconcerting to say the least and I would bop back and forth between them. I remember even being a bit flirtatious and bounced on one of their knees though I can’t recall which one it was. The sketches were straight from their

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vaudeville act and of course most of the jokes were at my expense as I usually played some sexy young thing in a low-cut dress. To me it was burlesque and I didn’t feel exploited in the least. The dancers were excited when we were told that we were booked to go on The Ed Sullivan Show along with Smith and Dale. We never got out of Toronto so a trip to New York was thrilling for all of us. I was told I’d be dancing with the company and also acting with Smith and Dale in their sketch. My partner Glen Gilmore and I were also told we’d be dancing a pas de deux. We rehearsed in Toronto and then traveled to New York for the live performance. We had our dress rehearsal and singer Abbe Lane and her husband, band leader Xavier Cugat, were scheduled to go on after Glen and my dance routine. The next thing I knew, I was pulled aside and told that my dance with Glen was cut. I asked why and was told that Abbe threw a diva fit about following me on stage. She billed herself as this sexpot singer and in retrospect I think I gave her too much competition. The live sketch with Smith and Dale went perfectly since these guys were such old pros. As My sultry look posing for an album cover while living for the dance number, Ed Sullivan was standing in Montreal, ca. 1958.

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in the wings planted right in the spot where I was supposed to enter from and he wouldn’t move. Once I heard my cue, I had to elbow the great Ed Sullivan out of the way. But being Canadian I did politely say “excuse me” as I pushed him aside. Back in Toronto, someone at the CBC told me that a photographer from Playboy magazine wanted to do a “Girls of Canada” issue and couldn’t get anyone to pose. When I was a child I used to admire “Petty Girl” calendars that hung on the walls of the house I was living in. Some of them even featured ballet dancers drawn in pointe shoes. Thinking Playboy was along those lines, I readily agreed to meet with the magazine’s photographer. I went to a hotel and was greeted by a lovely middle-aged Italian couple who then explained their dilemma to me. It seems that no one was interested in being in Playboy even though its popularity in the States was soaring and it was shaking everything up culturally. This was long before the magazine began featuring pubic hair and became a bit raunchy. Feeling comfortable with the pair, I agreed to pose and help them find other attractive young women. I talked to a few friends about Playboy and some jumped at the offer while others looked at me horrified and said no. At the time, I was in a show with a lovely girl named Louise who was a singer from a village in Quebec. She had come to the big city to try her hand at acting. When I told her about Playboy she said yes. Surprisingly, I wasn’t asked to pose topless or even semi-nude though a lot of the other girls were. But looking back, I’m not sure if I should have been elated or insulted! They photographed me outdoors wearing a scarf over my head, and dressed me in a yellow sweater and ski pants. In the magazine they described me as a “kerchiefed beguiler.” An older woman I knew loaned her lovely boudoir for the photo shoot with my French Canadian friend. Apparently she got a little carried away, revealing more than she meant to. In the time lapse before the issue came out, she decided to pack it in and go home to Quebec to marry the boy she left behind. But when our November 1963 Playboy issue hit the stands, with me pictured in the corner of the contents page as well as in the pictorial, I learned that the “merde” hit the fan and all hell broke loose in the tiny French Canadian village. Needless to say, the wedding was called off. Probably because word got around that I posed for Playboy, a CBC producer-director, who was about ten years ahead of his time, asked if I would like to do a pornographic movie (or as they were called back then a “nudie film”) on a boat sailing the inland waterways to Florida. Instead of being insulted about the offer, I replied incredulously, “I didn’t know you could get from Canada to Florida by river!” After spending about five minutes explaining to me how it could be done, he asked me again about appear-

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ing in his movie but I turned him down. I must have told someone because it got all over town and I was asked if it would be okay to write a sketch about this incident for an annual comedy review called Spring Thaw, which I had performed in all the years that I worked in Toronto. I never knew how it was received by the audience because I had split town before it premiered. In 1963, I decided it was time to leave Toronto. I had a fair amount of success but knew that the States was where I could earn a living as an actress since performing was the only thing I knew how to do. So I decided to relocate to California. I wanted to come to New York, but I wasn’t sure of my talent. Knowing I was well trained though, especially in comedy, I headed for Hollywood, sight unseen! I checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, which was the only one I had heard of. They gave me a really nice room off the pool, with a little garden, fenced in for privacy. I felt just like a movie star. The next day, after I found out they charged movie star prices for the room, I asked for a cheaper one. They obliged. I got on a bus for Burbank in the Valley and NBC Studios. I chose it because NBC was my favorite TV network. I walked right in somehow, and ended up in the casting director’s office. She was impressed with my credits but advised me to get a talent agent and randomly recommended the Armstrong-Deuser Agency. She phoned Sam Armstrong and sent me back to Beverly Hills in a cab. Sam Armstrong was “Old School” and a friend to Schwab of drugstore fame. He was a classy gentleman who always wore three-piece suits and he would tell stories while drifting from lane to lane on the freeway, a cigarette with the longest ash clenched in his teeth. He’d fill my head with tales about the glory days of Hollywood and how much more exciting it was and how this was now the doldrums with the studios collapsing. He told me about one of his clients, Luise Rainer, who won two back-to-back Best Actress Academy Awards for The Great Ziegfeld and The Good Earth in 1936 and 1937, and then ran off with a writer and was never heard from again. It was a cautionary tale. I didn’t know it at the time. Sam was just wonderful and, though he was very old, he set a merry pace of making the rounds, introducing me to all the studio producers and casting directors. I was working within two weeks in a delightful play called Under the Yum Yum Tree at a perfect theater on Ivar Street. I took over for the original actress cast in the part of the virginal coed (played by Carol Lynley in the movie version) who tries to live platonically with her boyfriend to see if they are marriage-compatible while being lasciviously pursued by her playboy landlord played by Richard Erdman. The play’s producer used to always ask me out but I would decline his offer every time. The theater had a bar downstairs where I would go after the

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show with the other cast members. The hip stage manager, who was African American, said to me, “Gail, you’ll never make it in this town.” I asked why and he quipped, “Because your brains aren’t tied to your ass.” I guess I should have been thinking of advancing my career by kissing up to the producer but I was more interested in hanging out with the cast singing classic American songs by Cole Porter, Duke Ellington and others, accompanied by the bar’s young piano player who tickled my fancy as well as the ivories. Suffice it to say, I invited him to my Laurel Canyon apartment one night. I definitely was not the typical, staid, all–American virgin. He was an extremely good-looking, charming boy. We were immediately attracted to each other, and he came home with me a few nights during the course of the play’s run. I found my apartment through some young men I met after relocating from the Beverly Hills Hotel to a more modestly priced hotel. They drove me up to 26051 ⁄2 Laurel Canyon, which was owned by actress-dancer Ruta Lee’s mother, Mrs. Kilmonis. She lived in a huge Spanish-styled home with detached, small efficiency apartments on her property. Someone just moved out and I took the quaint apartment, which overlooked Laurel Canyon, right on the spot. One of my neighbors was Vince Edwards, who just hit it big playing Dr. Ben Casey on television. Under the Yum Yum Tree was a huge hit and ran for months. The stage manager at the Ivar thought I was really cool so he invited me to an experimental African-American stage production in a little theater off of La Cienega Blvd. The cast was all black and the audience was made of mostly white people. They announced that the doors were locked and then the cast began harassing the audience with cat calls and derogatory comments about white people. I wasn’t nervous but I think they were trying to show what African-Americans went through when marching for their civil rights while being jeered at by bigoted whites in the South. It was very thought-provoking. Despite my lack of interest in playing the Hollywood game of dating the right people, I was nevertheless landing lead guest parts on TV shows where I was cast frequently as a teenager even though I was twenty-seven years old. I had naturally ashen blonde hair but once the studios got hold of you back then, there was nothing you could do to stop them from bleaching it. In most of my TV shows and movies I am pictured with almost platinum blonde hair. On Mr. Novak (“The Exile”), I was one of English teacher James Franciscus’ high school students and on My Three Sons (“The Chaperone”), Quinn O’Hara and I played classmates of Robbie Douglas who attend his masquerade party. We were supposed to be “bad girls” but the most delinquent thing I did was go-go dance on the Douglas couch. Quinn was a gorgeous redhead and I remember spending a fun day with her at the home of composer Johnny

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Me as a virginal coed and Richard Erdman as a lecherous landlord in a scene from the Ivar Theater stage production Under the Yum Yum Tree, 1963.

Mandel. I also did a Perry Mason (“The Case of the Careless Kidnapper”) where I played a trial witness and a Wagon Train (“Those Who Stay Behind”) during its last season where I worked with Bruce Dern and Jay North, the little boy from Dennis the Menace. I played the wife of Peter Brown and we joined the wagon train but it doesn’t have enough room for all who want to ride with it. I remember I got shot in the episode and had a scene afterwards recovering while in bed. All these TV show appearances were done one right after the other. Back then you would get out of bed, put your hair into curlers and drive to the studio. They called it “wet and rolled.” I always loved cruising down the freeway with the top of my convertible down on glorious, sunny LA mornings with jazz music blasting from my radio as the town was just waking up from its night’s slumber. That is the best time of day to experience the beauty of that city before the traffic and smog take over. Once at the studio you would go directly to hair and makeup where they would remove the curlers and tease and back comb your hair into these big bouffant hair styles. My movie debut was playing a man-hungry, wisecracking beach bunny named Georgia in The Girls on the Beach. This was produced by Gene Cor-

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man, whose brother Roger Corman unofficially backed the movie. My agent took me to his office to meet with him and I brought with me a scrapbook of clippings and photographs that I had compiled, chronicling my career in Canada. He hired me for a role on the spot without even an audition. I think Gene liked my persona and cast me again in Beach Ball. Gene and Roger’s office was in the back of the studio where we shot this and they would wander on and off the set but never interfering with the director.

Lana Wood, Noreen Corcoran, me, and Linda Marshall in The Girls on the Beach (Paramount, 1965) with Sheila Bromley (at right). Courtesy Aron Kincaid.

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The Girls on the Beach is mostly remembered not for me but for the rare film appearance of the Beach Boys. In this beach movie without Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, Noreen Corcoran from the Bachelor Father TV sitcom, Linda Marshall, Lana Wood (Natalie’s younger sister), and I played sorority sisters who learn that their housemother has squandered the money for the mortgage on the sorority beach house. We then come up with various schemes to make some dough. Some surfer dudes wanting to get into our bikinis trick us into thinking they know the Beatles and we announce their appearance for a benefit. Suffice it to say, the Beatles don’t perform but we don Beatles wigs and ape them ... badly. Other young kids in the cast were Martin West, Aron Kincaid, Steve Rogers, Mary Mitchel, Anna Capri, and Linda Saunders, who changed her name to Lori Saunders and became Bobbi Jo #2 on TV’s Petticoat Junction. Nowadays when I happen upon this movie on one of its infrequent airings on cable TV, I have trouble distinguishing myself from blondes Noreen and Linda. The hairdresser teased our hair into identical hair styles and the makeup person made us all look alike with the exact same eye makeup. Noreen, the female lead, refused to wear a bikini or a two-piece swimsuit. The costumer had to outfit her in these hideous floral one-piece bathing suits with matching cover-ups. However, they also made her dye her beautiful chestnut brown hair blonde for the movie against her wishes so I did feel a bit sorry for her. Linda thought her thighs would look fat on the big screen so she draped herself in a beach towel in most of our scenes. I couldn’t believe the producers would let them get away with this. If you are ashamed or prudish about your body, why agree to star in a beach movie?! I found their hangups quite amusing. Lana Wood, on the other hand, had no attitude as she pranced onto the soundstage in her gold lamé bikini. She had no inhibitions whatsoever, which I think intimidated everyone. Being a bit older than these gals, I pretty much kept to myself. But seeing how poor Lana was ostracized, I sort of befriended her. I think they were jealous because her sister Natalie was a big movie star. I knew I was working on a low-budget movie but even so I thought the shooting schedule was very short and rushed. William Witney was a veteran director who worked on a number of B-movies in the Forties and Fifties. After completing a scene, we had a break. I had just sat down and lit a cigarette when he called us back to the set. I was exhausted and in frustration, I yelled, “Who do you have to fuck to get off this picture?!” Everybody laughed. This was an old line I think uttered first by Ida Lupino or Bette Davis. I just used it for this occasion. The one thing that stands out for me while shooting The Girls on the Beach is that Mr. Witney asked me to dance in front of the dreaded Beach

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Boys while they sang “Little Honda.” I was never a fan of rock ’n’ roll but after meeting Terry I did learn to appreciate some of it—but to this day not the Beach Boys! I was shaking and shimmying and I was thinking, “If they don’t yell cut pretty soon, there is nothing more in my repertoire that I can do. This music is so boring—I can’t stand it. If they play that riff one more time I’m going to kill somebody!” They just kept banging away. Thirty years later I am reading about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys describing this scene in his early youth, which he said was his lowest moment because there was this girl gyrating out in front during his very important song in his first movie. I am sorry I caused him so much grief. If only we were able to read each other’s minds. Then again, considering my dislike for his song and his group, it is better that we couldn’t. Neither I nor the rest of the cast ever received any residuals for The Girls on the Beach even though it played on television for years. I never noticed. Aron Kincaid did. He tried many times to get somebody from the Screen Actors Guild to investigate. Finally, three decades later, a savvy person at

The Beach Boys (pictured: Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, and Carl Wilson) warble on and on in this scene from The Girls on the Beach (Paramount, 1965) as I muster all my acting skills to pretend to look on adoringly. Behind us are Aron Kincaid, Martin West, and Linda Marshall. Courtesy Aron Kincaid.

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SAG realized what happened. The film was registered under its working title of Beach Girls so there was no connection to the title used. When SAG contacted Paramount, the studio balked at paying the thousands of dollars owed. Per Aron, SAG caved in and negotiated a much smaller amount per actor, which we finally received almost thirty years later! After completing The Girls on the Beach, I changed my last name on advice from my agent. Sam Armstrong said, “Gail, Gerber is a German name. This is a Jewish town.” I took “Gilmore” from my friend and dance partner in Canada, Glen Gilmore. His sister, who was also a ballet dancer, was named Gail so I just sort of stole her name. To make matters even more confusing, on some shows I asked to be billed as “Gale Gilmore.” Don’t ask me why. It was drilled into my head by Sam that I needed publicity, to have my name mentioned in the newspapers, to get ahead, so I let myself be talked into a rather bizarre publicity stunt worthy of Jayne Mansfield. Under advisement from a demimonde guy from Montreal, I borrowed a cute little puppy named Snipper from the local pound and walked, trailed by a photographer I hired, to the mailbox in front of Schwab’s Drugstore to mail a package containing Mexican Huaraches, which are sandals. I then stuffed both the package and the reluctant dog into the mailbox. I then began screaming to draw attention. The police and fire crews were called to rescue the pooch who emerged unscathed. Also as hoped, reporters showed up and the stories (with titles like “Doggone—He Just Missed” and “She Mails Pup Instead of Huaraches”), accompanied by photos of me posing with Snipper, appeared in newspapers across America and Canada. It was after this that I started to get letters from my acting friends in Toronto saying, “Congratulations on how well you’re In my imitation of Ringo Starr in The Girls on the Beach (Paramount, 1965), I not only had to play doing in your career in Holthe drums but had to set up the entire drum kit as lywood.” I thought, “Oh, irony!” Shortly afterwards nobody on the crew knew how to do it.

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they removed the mailbox from that corner. As for Snipper, he got his revenge by crapping all over my apartment for two weeks before I returned him to the shelter. As the newly named “Gail Gilmore,” I was cast in a supporting role as a vacationing coed in an Elvis Presley musical called Girl Happy, filmed on the back lot at MGM and the beach at Santa Monica even though the movie was supposed to take place in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was produced by Joe Pasternak and directed by Boris Sagal. This was Sagal’s first time working with Elvis and the fact that he had never before directed the King may have given the film a freshness and vitality that were lacking in some of Elvis’ other films around this time that were directed by stalwart Norman Taurog. Sagal had been working in television since 1955. Dime with a Halo (1963) starring BarBara Luna was his debut feature before directing Richard Chamberlain in his first starring movie role as a smalltime lawyer in Twilight of Honor (1963). In Girl Happy, Elvis played the leader of a musical combo who is performing at a club in Fort Lauderdale during spring break while simultaneously secretly chaperoning Shelley Fabares and her two friends, Chris Noel and Lyn Edgington. I wasn’t familiar with any of Elvis’ movies so I decided to go see one. I hopped into my ’52 Dodge and drove down from my home in Laurel Canyon to see Viva Las Vegas. I wanted to see what I was getting into. As I was limping back up the hill in my car, I was thinking, “This is crazy. The whole story was about young men and women diving into back seats of cars just to get laid!” My character, named Nancy, was paired with Jimmy Hawkins, who played one of Elvis’ buddies. I worked mostly with Jimmy, Pamela Curran and Rusty Allen, who played the girlfriends of Joby Baker and Gary Crosby (one of Bing’s sons); I thought Gary was a really talented guy. On the set, the guys in Elvis’ entourage kept inviting me to his house and I kept declining because I was still doing Under the Yum Yum Tree on stage at night. But even if I could have gone I wouldn’t have. I wasn’t familiar with Elvis Presley’s music and wasn’t interested in hearing it. Not knowing much about him (except that he was very friendly and polite to me), I wasn’t aware of his importance at the time. I was also invited one Sunday by Boris Sagal to attend a luncheon at producer Joe Pasternak’s home. Pasternak was a big-time producer and I was told that he could help further an actress’ career. He had produced such popular movies as Anchors Aweigh (1945), Summer Stock (1950), The Great Caruso (1951), Where the Boys Are (1960), and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963), and discovered such motion picture luminaries as Deanna Durbin, Elizabeth Taylor, Kathryn Grayson, and Jane Powell. I was a bit thrilled that

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he was interested in spending more time with me until our encounter on the set. He walked by me and asked hopefully, “You’re coming to lunch?” When I replied yes, he whispered, “Wear black underwear.” I smiled politely but I was thinking to myself, “Fat chance, you old letch.” I did go with Boris, who picked me up, but I wore “full body armor” consisting of a summery blouse and loose-fitting skirt. Surprisingly, it turned out to be a pleasant afternoon. One of Pasternak’s teenage sons was also there and he was simply charming as we hit it off to his father’s chagrin. Needless to say, I was never invited back again. During this time, my agent Sam Armstrong sent me to the opening of a Mexican restaurant. The ever unrelenting Henry Miller happened to call the night before. He wouldn’t take no for an answer and insisted on escorting me to this event. Henry was a sweet fellow in a way and I didn’t have the heart to turn him down though I wasn’t the least bit interested in anything romantic with him. The owner was surprised and delighted to have the great Henry Miller in her establishment. I guess she never expected a Hollywood starlet to show up with such an important literary figure on her arm. However, my agent and the teen fan magazine sent to cover the story were not too happy with me. I still was not shrewd enough to play the Hollywood game of getting publicity. They were hoping I would have brought someone like Fabian. Who?! Afterwards, Henry sent me a small book of his paintings which he sweetly inscribed, “To Gale, To see again and love again and paint—sometime.” I bet painting me wasn’t the only thing on his mind. He also wrote me some love letters, which I still have to this day. After Girl Happy filming was completed, Sam Armstrong got me an audition at MGM for a movie called The Loved One, which leads back to my meeting Terry that day on the set. Being with Terry, I got to know first-hand the machinations going on around me. Prior to that, the only thing that I was conscious of was that actress Pamela Curran, a blonde, statuesque Julie Newmar–type whom I shared a trailer with and worked with on Girl Happy, was popping some kind of pills whenever she got the chance. I never asked for one. It was just so Valley of the Dolls. Some of the other gals who played Whispering Glades hostesses thought Pamela was haughty but I thought she was just stoned. Terry explained to me that Tony Richardson had just been awarded an Oscar for directing the ribald British comedy Tom Jones. However, he had made the deal for The Loved One before his big win, and wanted to renegotiate his contract. He did not succeed, and was furious, working, in his estimation, for less than his worth. Tony compensated for this by charging the company as much as possible in production costs. The screening of the pre-

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Everybody say queso! At the opening of a Mexican restaurant in Hollywood with (from left) the proprietor, me, Henry Miller, the unidentified actress and her date, 1964.

vious day’s dailies was held in the basement theater of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Everyone had to run a gauntlet of long tables laden with salmon, shrimp, cold cuts, and every type of gourmet treat you could possibly imagine. There was expensive food there for anyone who passed by. Champagne, Dom Perignon, only the best of course, was served at seven-thirty in the morning; corks were popping every day like it was New Year’s Eve. While filming, Tony took as many takes as possible and wasted time between set-ups by working at a snail’s pace. Terry chuckled that Tony had barred the executive producer, Martin Ransohoff (the model for the producer character in Terry’s novel Blue Movie), from the set. Tony purposely went over budget and extended the shooting schedule by weeks. Terry was one of the first writers or maybe the first writer to always be on the set. In those days, you handed in your script and you went home, never to be seen again. Terry changed all that for a while. He was on the set at all times to make script changes and co-write wonderful vignettes for all these incredible actors. He loved to tailor his work to a specific person. He would watch what the actor was doing, and then he and the actor would put their heads together in deep conversation. The actors loved his work and his dia-

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logue so much that Tony couldn’t get them to stop. A less confident director probably would not have allowed Terry to talk to his actors. Terry felt that Tony’s perverseness reached into his casting choices. Despite the fact that such popular and talented young British actors as Albert Finney, Terence Stamp, David Hemmings, and Tom Courtenay would all have been wonderful in the lead, Tony stuck with the roster of MGM contract players. He cast as the English poet American actor Robert Morse, who prior to this had starred in the hit Broadway musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and the non-hit movie comedies Honeymoon Hotel and Quick, Before It Melts, which co-starred Anjanette Comer in her film debut. She too was not quite right and a bit bland in the role but she did have a macabre look to her, which I thought was perfect for the part. One day while at lunch, Tony saw actress Pamela Tiffin dining and remarked that he wished he would have chosen her for the role of Aimee instead of Comer. Other than the two leads, Terry loved all the other casting choices for the star cameo roles. He was delighted to find himself writing for stars like Jonathan Winters, Rod Steiger, Margaret Leighton, Milton Berle, Sir John Gielgud, and Liberace. The one performer that got away, to Terry’s disappointment, was the notorious comic Lenny Bruce. Terry wanted him to play the foul-mouthed, drunken advice columnist ultimately played by Lionel Stander, who managed a whole new career out of the role after being a blacklisted actor due to the McCarthy hearings in the Fifties. Lenny turned it down, saying that he wanted to make his own movie. Terry and I visited Lenny twice in his Hollywood Hills home. The first time it was early evening in the summer of 1964. The sun was shining when we arrived at his house, which overlooked a steep ravine. Terry knew Lenny from New York; in fact, he had been with him at the Russian Tea Room when President Kennedy was shot. Zero Mostel was also in the restaurant, and rushed to the phone to call his stock broker. Lenny had a show that night at a club and, on hearing the horrible news, asked Terry what he should say in his act. Terry didn’t know what to advise him, and when he showed up at the club for the show, Lenny walked on stage and said, “Phew, poor Vaughn Meader.” Meader was an up-and-coming comic whose whole act was based on his impression of President Kennedy. His career was now over. I too had met Lenny before, in Atlantic City. I had flown there from Toronto for a long weekend, with a member of the Toronto demimonde. The plan, not completely told to me, was to meet Frank Sinatra, who would then be smitten with me. It seems a bit of horse trading was going on at my expense. I sat at the end of the bar and Lenny came on stage. He spotted me immediately and did the whole show to me. He rushed over after his act to introduce himself. Not knowing the plan of my demimonde friend, I thought

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Lenny was wonderful. I knew his work—everyone did. I stayed for the second show, and we left together. He was staying in a rooming house with the smell of cabbage, and babies crying. All his money obviously went for dope. On our way over from the bar, he let me carry a small tartan case. I assume it held his precious drugs. We went up the rickety stairs to his room, which to my relief must have been the best room in the tenement. We laid on the bed while he wrote poems and signed photographs pledging his love to me. Nothing sexual happened because it couldn’t. I guess, being a junkie, he didn’t want to get into all that thrashing about, with an embarrassing end. We didn’t even snuggle. We talked and listened to music, and in the morning after giving me a chaste goodbye kiss I got on a plane back to Toronto. Terry wouldn’t have believed that story in a million years, and I certainly never told him. To keep it a secret, I foolishly tore up all the poems and pictures Lenny gave me. When Terry and I walked into Lenny’s house, Terry introduced Lenny to me. Lenny shook my hand and looked into my eyes and said, “How do you do?” He sensed this was an important relationship for both of us, and that men are jealous creatures. He was so cool and hip. Lenny’s wife Honey Bruce was there. She served drinks, and was charming and gay. The second time we met with Lenny was in 1965. Terry and I went with William Claxton, who was renowned for his photographs of some of the world’s best-known jazz musicians. He was a good friend of Terry’s and was hired to be the still photographer on The Loved One. It was afternoon, and Lenny was alone in a wheelchair with both legs in casts up to his thighs. He explained that while under the influence of LSD he had jumped out of a window in San Francisco, hollering “Super Jew,” breaking both legs. Claxton took pictures of him and Terry around a small pool, with Terry pushing the wheelchair and saluting his friend. Lenny was so fascinating that day. He was totally involved in his trial for obscenity. He told us that the prosecutor had to read from his act but he wouldn’t say the offending word “cocksucker,” which had to be noted in the record. Once the lawyer said it aloud, it was set free and everyone in the courtroom wanted to say it. Of all the actors in The Loved One, the standout had to be Rod Steiger. He played the effete chief embalmer Mr. Joyboy who falls in love with Anjanette Comer’s bizarrely shallow Aimee Thanatogenos, whom he helps promote from cosmetician to the first female embalmer. The pairing of the two was straight out of The Addams Family. His character has to be one of the most memorable and disturbing from Sixties cinema. The scenes with Rod and actress Ayllenne Gibbons as his obese mother are both hysterically funny and painful to watch.

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I was so thrilled to be working with Rod Steiger because he was my favorite actor ever since I saw him dance in the ballet sequence in the movie musical Oklahoma! He lifted ballerina Bambi Lynn so gracefully and didn’t break her ribs, which is a feat for someone without ballet training. I regret that I never told him how wonderful I thought he was. But then maybe I couldn’t muster up the courage because at lunchtime Rod would come to the set with his dyed blond hair in curlers wearing nothing but a Speedo. He was some sight standing patiently in line with his tray in-hand waiting to get his turn at the lavish buffet spread. Terry and I even paid him a visit at his Malibu beach house. That day he seemed lonely and tired. I still didn’t mention how much I admired him. Sometimes people just get shy and don’t speak up when they should, especially if they have something nice to say. I’ve always regretted not telling Rod how much his work meant to me. Terry’s favorite scene in the movie was the one he created when Joyboy’s mother in a gluttonous rage manages to get her immense body out of bed and raids the icebox, gorging on leftovers so voraciously that she falls to the floor with the refrigerator’s contents spilling out on top of her. Terry cherished a still autographed photo Ayllenne Gibbons gave to him. Shooting of The Loved One finally came to an end and Terry was at a high at this point of his career. Candy was on the New York Times best seller list, and Dr. Strangelove was in the theaters. One weekend Terry came to pick me up, and I met John Calley, whom Terry nicknamed “Black Jack,” an elegant young producer on The Loved One who Tony Richardson did allow on the set, and Frank Perry, who had directed the acclaimed film David and Lisa starring Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin as psychologically disturbed teenagers who fall in love in In costume from The Loved One (MGM, 1965).

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a mental institution. Calley and Perry wanted to make a small art film of Candy. When shooting was completed on The Loved One, Terry didn’t go back to New York and his wife. Instead he chose to remain in LA and he moved into the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. When not working on the Candy screenplay, Terry collaborated with his good friend William Claxton on a picture book entitled The Journal of The Loved One. They did this not for promotional purposes dictated by MGM but just for the fun of it. The book, written diary-style, features rare behind-the-scenes photos of the making of the movie accompanied by Terry’s witty musings and comments on the proceedings. Terry and I didn’t attend the opening of The Loved One because we were out of the country. When I finally saw the movie, I was hard-pressed to find myself despite the many weeks I worked on it. I’m on screen for a few brief moments thanks to Terry, who told Tony Richardson, “The kid needs a break— give her a close-up.” The camera zooms in on me as I look on disapprovingly from the adjoining cubicle while Anjanette coyly flirts with Rod Steiger, who is examining the makeup job she has performed on someone’s loved one. The Loved One (with the tagline, “The motion picture with something to offend everyone!”) received mixed reviews when it was released though Terry’s screenplay with Christopher Isherwood garnered praise. Even still, the aheadof-its-time black comedy was a bit too distasteful for 1965 audiences and, coupled with the less-than stellar pairing of Robert Morse and Anjanette Comer in the lead roles, couldn’t attract paying customers. MGM also lost faith in the movie and didn’t give it the promotional push it needed to succeed at the box office. But then again, a dark satire such as this, which was truly a scathing condemnation of the Sixties, was not what the studios were used to marketing in those days of The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins. As for Terry, he was disappointed in the lack of enthusiasm for the movie but he just loved the scenes that he wrote (he always did). He felt strongly that cinematographer Haskell Wexler deserved at least an Academy Award nomination for his stunning black-and-white cinematography and that Tony Richardson did a good job with the movie other than with the casting of Morse and Comer, whom Terry was displeased with. Years later, Morse revealed that since he had such a hard time maintaining a British accent, Tony had audio taped him while reciting his entire dialogue from the script and it was looped into the film during post-production. Today, fans and historians consider The Loved One to be one of the most underrated comedies of the Sixties. Terry would heartily agree as he always felt that this was his most under-appreciated work. After years of clamoring for it to be put out on DVD, MGM finally relented and released it in 2006 to many a film aficionado’s delight.

2. A Straight Flush Beats a Full House Every Time Terry was still staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel where he was working on the screenplay for Candy. I was sharing a house up on Benedict Canyon with a blacklisted writer (whose name escapes me) who owned the dwelling and I would drive down to meet Terry in his suite. With a full bottle of B&B Scotch by his side, Terry would be typing away laughing while I watched in amazement as the liquor slowly evaporated with no apparent effect on him. He was a drinking man and had a tremendous metabolism for alcohol. Unbeknownst to me at the time, his father was an alcoholic and I later learned that this is symptomatic of future alcoholism. All the experiments with drugs in his youth were interesting to him but liquor was an anesthetic. It numbed the pain and let the imagination soar. He also suffered from a kind of narcolepsy. Booze would energize him more so than the Dexedrine he used to take. Terry suspected anyone who didn’t drink, women especially. He thought someone like Lillian Hellman, known for her hard-drinking with the boys, was what a real woman should be. Or a friend nicknamed “Falling Down Sally” who was legendary for keeling over drunk from a high bar stool at exactly the same time every night. “You could set your watch by her,” Terry used to say. Hearing this made me apprehensive as I could hardly be expected to live up to these ladies’ reputations. Terry and I became inseparable despite the fact that we were both still legally married. My marriage was over and according to Terry so was his, despite the fact that he had a four-year-old son. Together we spent a lot of time at the Malibu beach house of Robert Walker, Jr. (his friends called him Bobby), and his wife Ellie. Bobby was the son of movie stars Robert Walker and Jennifer Jones. An actor in his own right, he had just won a Golden Globe Award for his performance in The Ceremony (1963) with Laurence Harvey. He and Ellie, real bohemians, would host an open house every weekend. It was very communal. There was never any guest list and all were welcome to come—even their children. Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, and Michael Parks were just some of the people who traipsed through. It was a 26

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laid-back, trippy paradise of sun, marijuana, sand, marijuana, and food as anyone was invited to cook if they felt like it. With all that pot (or as Terry called it, “Wog-hemp”) being smoked, you bet people were hungry. Bobby’s house had a sunny, open living room looking out over the ocean, where a few babies in diapers sat on their bottoms in front of the television, watching carefully. Not a fan of children, especially toddlers, I was mesmerized by them. I’m sure it was because I was high. When the TV commentator would announce “Channel 2,” the babies would shout in unison, “Two!” Bobby meanwhile spent his time in his scuba gear, at the bottom of the pool. Terry embraced this new counterculture as he was a believer in staying current and with the times. He continued being that way through the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, never judging, and always accepting everything that was happening at face value—a true hipster to the end. Smoking pot was common during Terry’s life way before these carefree Malibu days. Growing up in Texas, Terry and his friends liked to push over cows that had eaten too much loco weed, which grew in ditches. In Paris, the Americans would go to the Arab Quarter to intercept the hash-making because they wanted the leaves for cigarettes. Terry would go to the apartment of an Arab to whom he dedicated his novel Candy; there he’d be making the hashish and smoking it, while a totally stoned dog slept on the floor. As Terry got older he admitted that marijuana tended to cripple the will in young people, and in the Sixties, when What do starlets do in their down time? Have their almost everyone was pictures taken straddling a bongo drum, of course.

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smoking pot, he didn’t want anyone to do it around his young son. When asked why, he said, “I don’t want Nile to have to lie to his friends at school.” I was enjoying my carefree romance with Terry until he demanded that I get my own apartment because he was jealous of my landlord even though we had separate living spaces and rarely saw each other in the rambling onestory house. This was my first, but not my last, experience with Terry’s oppressiveness. I was annoyed with his insistence and we got into an argument. That night I was supposed to accompany him to a party at the home of Jennifer Jones. I was a big fan of hers after seeing her in such classics as The Song of Bernadette (1943), Duel in the Sun (1946), Love Is a ManySplendored Thing (1955), and A Farewell to Arms (1957). I really wanted to go but I had my pride and refused to attend. Terry asked Jennifer to interject on his behalf and she did. I had met the still gorgeous actress once before and I found her to be very friendly. Jennifer was sympathetic to my plight. She called me and said, “Come to the party. I think Terry is for you, Gail.” Who could say no to Jennifer Jones? I took her advice and did not break it off with Terry just yet, so we went to Jennifer’s soiree together. Shortly after, Jennifer and I went to hear LSD guru Timothy Leary speak at some gathering. It was a sight to behold with him sprawled out on a king-sized bed dressed in a gossamer white robe pontificating on various topics while the audience (mostly made up of women) sat cross-legged on the floor in rapture. I eventually did move out after finding a nifty two-bedroom duplex apartment on Fountain Avenue in Hollywood, which I shared with a roommate. Soon after, I was surprised to learn that Terry’s wife came to town with their child in tow and checked into the Chateau Marmont just off the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood where an obligated Terry soon joined them. Unfortunately for me, I had a view of the Marmont from my new place. Terry had a life-altering decision to make and I just had to give him his space and wait it out. Less than a week later, mother and son had departed. I never asked Terry what was discussed and he never shared with me. Assured by Terry that his marriage was over, I broke my lease so I could move in with him because it felt right. Despite his possessiveness, Terry’s unique Zen-like take on just about everything was a perfect match for me with my atypical background. As a little girl, I was always a precocious reader. While shoveling in my cornflakes in Canada, I would read the English side of the cereal box and then turn it around and read the French side. I’m not sure who the grownups were around me but they were pretty hip. I found and read books by the Russian philosopher Peter Ouspensky and LebaneseAmerican writer Kahlil Gibran. The New Yorker magazine seemed to always be around—perhaps not suitable reading for a twelve-year-old. At ballet I

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was dancing to Stravinsky, Ravel and Shostakovich. Someone taught me to tap my toe on the two and the four of a beat when I was not as tall as a bar stool. What was I doing in a bar? I have no idea, but it wasn’t my first time, and the music was big band swing. My father was great. All he liked to do was drive the car and go to lunch. That’s what I like to do. I think it’s genetic. But I never spent much time with him. When Terry came along, he seemed to fit right into the puzzle of my life. Neither one of us was overly affectionate or sentimental. He tried to help me evolve and to leave behind the opinions and judgments one is taught and to wake up every morning to live life in the moment. This was not a prevalent idea forty years ago. When I asked Terry how one figures out the truth of anything, he replied, “The Categorical Imperative,” a concept conjured up by the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. I had no idea what that was and Terry explained, “It means, ‘That which is self-evident.’ That is all you need.” We lived together at the Chateau Marmont. The once grand hotel just off the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood was almost forgotten. It was seedy, and run by two old ladies at the phone switchboard, who would answer in singsong, “Chateau Marmont.” They would always manage to get all the wires tangled up, so no one knew who was talking to whom. I would ask them which famous writer lived and died in which apartment. Terry and I wound up staying in a few of them over the years. I wasn’t settled long at the Marmont when Terry suggested that I get a divorce. I felt this was an odd request but phoned my lawyer anyway though I knew something Terry didn’t. I went to his office and told him that we had a problem. He asked what and I said, “My companion wants me to get a divorce but it is not recognized in Quebec because it is a strict Catholic province.” The attorney was taken aback and didn’t believe me. He then climbed up a ladder and reached for a thick law book high up on the top shelf. Bringing it back to his desk, he flipped through it, looked up at me, and said, “You’re right. There is no divorce in Quebec unless you get a bill of Parliament.” I then paid him $250 for a quickie “Hollywood” divorce, which seemed to appease Terry though legally I was still married in the eyes of the law. Soon after, my agent Sam landed me a guest role on the TV show The Littlest Hobo. This was Canada’s answer to Rin Tin Tin and Lassie. I was very excited about this part because at the end of the episode I had this great monologue with London the dog and thought I could do some real acting. I imagined a very poignant scene with the canine looking me straight in the eye. However, not all went as I planned. When I arrived on the set in Vancouver, I learned that five different German Shepherds played the part, each

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trained to do a different task. When the time came for my big scene with the dog, as I emoted looking into his eyes, London was looking straight over my head at his trainer standing directly behind me and just barely out of camera range. W. C. Fields was so right when he said to never work with animals or children. While I was in Vancouver, my mother and her new husband came to visit me on the set. She surprised me by asking, “Gail, have you ever smoked marijuana?” Intrigued, I replied, “Sure. Want some?” I gave her some grass and her husband removed the seeds. The next time I was in Canada staying at their house, they showed me their garden and to my amazement these towering marijuana plants were growing in between the tomatoes and zucchinis. Sometime after I returned home from being upstaged by that dog on The Littlest Hobo, Terry and I were talking and I mentioned that I had worked with Elvis Presley in Girl Happy but I was not a fan of his. Terry was dumbstruck! He told me that Elvis was very influential in the crossover of what was called race music. While he was living in Geneva, Switzerland, he’d play all these Elvis Presley records and his snooty jazz and literary friends would have rather run out into a blizzard than listen to Elvis. Terry understood the dynamics of Elvis’ crossover music more so than his peers at the time and he was always eager to embrace the next cultural change. Frank Perry and Terry’s plan to bring Candy to the big screen hit a snag due to the rights problem with the novel, which was entangled among Terry, co-writer Mason Hoffenberg, and the many pirated editions. Legend had it that publishing Candy was more profitable than printing counterfeit money. The messy Candy situation is enough for a whole book by itself (and it is). But in a nutshell, the saga began when Terry met Mason, a writer, poet and trust fund baby, in either the Village or Paris. In the early Fifties, Terry had created a short story about a good-hearted girl and a hunchback and showed it to Mason, who thought she should have more adventures. They then began collaborating on the novel. At the time, Terry was residing in Geneva with his second wife, who had gotten a job teaching at a school for the children of United Nations staff members while Mason was still residing in Paris. Since they were living in different countries they would correspond with each other, sharing ideas. However, a frustrated Terry did the majority of the writing while gadfly Mason was living the high life with his French wife and only created the hospital and Dr. Krankeit sections. Even so, a big-hearted Terry (not thinking ahead) gave his friend equal credit. Mason contacted a shrewd publisher named Maurice Girodias, of Olympia Press, who decided to publish it. He made his money releasing “DBs” or “dirty books” in English for American tourists. Many Americans worked for

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him, toiling away at their “DBs,” including some talented women like Iris Owens. Girodias also distributed adult works other publishers wouldn’t touch such as William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. In those days, since books weren’t written by two people, Terry and Mason settled on the pseudonym “Maxwell Kenton” (a name Terry used earlier when writing detective fiction with David Burnett). Candy was released in France in 1958 and the following year it was re-issued by Olympia Press as Lollipop (a title provided by Terry) to fool the customs inspectors since Candy was banned in the U.S. The problems for Terry and Mason surfaced when the duo learned that Girodias never informed them that if a book was first published in English outside the U.S., an “ad-interim copyright,” which was good for six months, was needed and had to be renewed every six months. Terry and Mason were not the first or last authors the notorious publisher took advantage of. In 1962, Putnam published Candy in hardcover in the United States. The book made the New York Times best seller list for a number of weeks. After several soldout printings, Putnam was about to put out a softcover edition when cheaper paperback knockoffs were rushed into release by publishers such as Ampoc in Burbank, California; Brandon House in North Hollywood, California; Greenleaf in Evanston, Illinois; and Lancer in New York. This was all legal as they claimed they were reprints of the out-of-copyright original French edition. Thus began a roundelay of lawsuits as royalties were withheld and copyright ownership was questioned. Even with the pirated editions flooding the market, the notorious bawdy paperback version of Candy released by Putnam rose to the top of the bestseller charts in Publishers Weekly and remained there well into 1965. Despite the popularity of the novel, Hollywood was always leery about getting involved with properties that have “clouded titles” so it was no surprise that Frank Perry gave up on the idea of directing the film version of Candy, much to Terry’s disappointment. Needing to make some money, Terry was offered and accepted a nine-to-five job at MGM but only after agreeing to take a Loyalty Oath “to the U.S. of A.” as he used to joke. He was assigned a tiny writing cubicle in a row of tiny cubicles once occupied by many great American novelists-turn-screenwriters including William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Every day Terry would trek to the studio to hunker down in his minuscule work space surrounded by other screenwriters. He would be assigned to polish a script without receiving credit. It was not a very creative atmosphere and about as far from people’s fantasies about working in “glamourous” Hollywood as could be. Terry mentioned to me about the guy in the next cubicle who smoked and coughed a lot. One Monday, Terry went

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to work and the guy wasn’t there. Terry asked about him and was told the man had died of cancer over the weekend. Terry quit smoking that very day. Coincidentally, I auditioned at MGM for another Elvis movie, Harem Holiday. They changed the title of it to Harum Scarum just before it was released. It was a much bigger part than the one I played in Girl Happy and I would get the chance to dance with Elvis. I was skeptical at first because here I was a fair-skinned blonde from Canada and they wanted me to play a dark-haired Arab—that’s Hollywood! My agent used to instruct me not to tell anyone that I was a dancer because I would be typecast. I really wanted to dance with Elvis so I revealed to them my background in ballet. Once the role was offered, Terry was excited because he wanted to meet Elvis. In Harum Scarum, I played a gypsy named Sapphire. She was also a member of a band of thieves who help Elvis (a kidnapped American singing star) thwart a plot to assassinate their country’s king by a gang of rebels led by Fran Jeffries and Theo Marcuse. Mary Ann Mobley (whom I previously worked with on Girl Happy) was an Arabian princess and Elvis’ love interest. As you can see, the casting was only true to life in the twisted minds of the Hollywood establishment out to make a quick buck off the back of Elvis. The film’s choreographer was David Winters, who played a Jet in West Side

Fran Jeffries, Wilda Taylor, me under that long black wig, Brenda Benet, and Elvis Presley in Harum Scarum (MGM, 1965).

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Story and then choreographed a number of Elvis and beach movies. He coached me and my fellow “gypsies” Brenda Benet and Wilda Taylor, who was also his assistant, on an exotic dance we perform in the town square while Elvis sings “Shake That Tambourine.” The film’s finale also was a big production number set in Las Vegas and we danced again with Elvis as he sang “Harem Holiday.” As we rehearsed this last number, I showed Elvis how to do Chaînès Finger Turns. I have a picture of us going off stage. He was not planted right but we did it and nobody broke their neck. However, they cut it from the movie. Another moment I recall was a scene where Mary Ann Mobley had to enter the town square standing in a cart being pulled by a donkey while a band of thieves are trying to scale the prison walls where Elvis is being held captive. I was part of that ragtag bunch that included little Billy Barty and a really tall actor whose name escapes me. The director, Gene Nelson, was a former dancer and surprisingly straight. He instructed Mary Ann to act shocked and, after glancing our way, she replied, “How can I not?” I cracked up laughing. When I worked with Elvis previously in Girl Happy, I continually declined his friends’ invitations to the King’s gatherings. I was working on

Dancing with Elvis Presley in Harum Scarum (MGM, 1965).

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stage at night in Under the Yum Yum Tree but even so, I really had no interest in attending. On Harum Scarum, one guy in Elvis’ entourage named Red West came over to me and asked if I was going to come to any parties on this movie. I told him I had found a fellow. He said, “You can’t find a good fellow in Hollywood.” I replied, “Oh, he’s from Texas.” That seemed to satisfy Red, who said he was happy for me. I had so much fun working with Elvis on this movie. He loved orange soda. Outside of his trailer he had soda pop bottles standing up in a cooler filled with melting ice like they used to do in the South. I was very impressed by that. He also used to practice his karate moves and try to break bricks with his hands. Elvis was intelligent, quiet and very sweet. But at that time, he seemed like a young man in turmoil—sort of like a “Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?” kind of thing. Elvis was a tortured guy who obviously hoped for, and deserved, something better than the movies he was getting offered, like Harum Scarum. Terry came to the set one day. Despite his hipster persona, he was extremely shy. He met Elvis outside my trailer. Elvis said to him, “We watched Dr. Strangelove sixteen times.” Terry was surprised and exclaimed, “You went to the theater sixteen times to see it?” But in those days, Elvis was such a big star he was able to get films and show them at his house. The two of them had a nice mutual respect for one another. While I continued working on Harum Scarum, Terry was brought in by producer Martin Ransohoff to rewrite the screenplay for The Cincinnati Kid, based on the novel by Richard Jessup. Ransohoff had hired Terry to co-write The Loved One and was impressed with Terry’s screenwriting skills. Former blacklisted writer Ring Lardner, Jr., authored a first draft while working with the movie’s original director Sam Peckinpah. Nobody was happy with Lardner’s screenplay so Terry stepped in. Since Terry worked from Ring’s script, Lardner received screen credit which was significant as it was the first time he did not have to use a pseudonym since being blacklisted. The Cincinnati Kid, set in Thirties New Orleans, was the story of an upstart poker player named Eric Stoner (nicknamed “The Kid”) who challenges aging legendary champion Lancey Howard to a poker game. The high stakes match is arranged by a former challenger and the Kid’s friend Shooter, who is married to a selfish younger woman named Melba who desires the Kid even though she is friends with his girlfriend Christian. As a warm-up, Lancey plays with some rich local businessmen and wins big. A very powerful man named Slade who doesn’t like to lose wants revenge against Lancey. He bribes Shooter, who is to be the dealer at the card game, to make sure the Kid wins after betting over $10,000 on him. Knowing his cheap wife will leave him if he can’t keep her in luxury, Stoner reluctantly agrees. Meanwhile

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Wilda Taylor, Brenda Benet, and I shake our tambourines while Elvis croons another song in Harum Scarum (MGM, 1965).

the Kid is so wrapped up in the upcoming game he neglects Christian, who returns home to her simple country life. Just before the match, a lonely Kid visits her, giving Christian hope that their relationship is still worth fighting for. During the course of the marathon poker game, Christian returns only to find Melba in the Kid’s hotel room and the Kid discovers that Shooter has been cheating in his favor. The Kid does the honorable thing and requests Lady Fingers to take over for Shooter. She deals the last hand as the Kid wagers everything when his fifth card gives him a full house against Lancey’s possible flush. The Kid and all the spectators are stunned when Lancey turns over his card, revealing not just a flush but a straight flush. Dejected, the Kid wanders into the alleyway where a shoeshine boy he has previously beaten twice pitching coins finally beats the Kid as well. Terry was a very hands-on screenwriter so he was allowed to sit in on casting decisions. When filming began with Peckinpah, only four actors were cast—Steve McQueen as the Kid, Edward G. Robinson as Lancey, AnnMargret as Melba, and Karl Malden as Stoner. One evening Terry came back to the Chateau Marmont and told me that he was in a meeting and someone said, “Let’s get a Rip Torn type” for the role of the villain Slade. Terry asked why they just didn’t hire Rip Torn. He was told, “Oh, he’s too much

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trouble—a real shit-kicker. We’ll get a Rip Torn type.” They then began rattling off names of actors to consider such as Bradford Dillman, Dean Stockwell, Bruce Dern—everybody but Rip Torn. Terry didn’t know Rip at the time but knew he was a first-rate actor so he persisted. Surprisingly, the studio acquiesced and Rip got the job. He moved into the Chateau Marmont with his wife Geraldine Page, who was carrying a beautiful little girl named Angelica on her left hip, and was pregnant with twins. Soon after he arrived, Sam Peckinpah, the other “shit-kicker” as dubbed by the producers, left the production after getting into a dispute with Ransohoff who fired him allegedly because he wanted an unwilling actress named Ann Morell to do a scene nude. He was quickly replaced by Norman Jewison who had directed a handful of movies, all comedies, up to that point including 40 Pounds of Trouble (1962) and Send Me No Flowers (1964). This would be his first dramatic feature. Because Sam Peckinpah began filming in black-and-white, all the footage was scrapped as Norman Jewison felt the movie should be shot in color and that the location should be shifted from St. Louis to New Orleans. Ransohoff and MGM agreed though they knew shooting on location in the Big Easy would make the movie more expensive. Norman also wasn’t happy with the original opening and told Terry the film needed to be “bookended.” Terry came up with the character of the African-American shoeshine boy who challenges Steve McQueen’s character to pitch quarters while in the background a funeral, complete with marching band and dancing mourners, is taking place in the French Quarter. The boy returns briefly in the middle of the movie and at the end. Norman also had Terry re-write most of the dialogue from the script as he felt it was too “heavyhanded” and “turgid.” Terry was wonderful at creating sharp, witty dialogue and he greatly lightened up the movie without losing its draMy dear friend Geraldine Page with her daughter, matic impact. Working in conjunction with NorAngelica Torn, ca. 1964. Courtesy of Angelica Torn.

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man, Terry also developed more fully the romantic relationship between the Kid and his girlfriend Christian (played by Tuesday Weld), which was given short shrift in the original screenplay. Norman felt the movie needed a “reflective break” from the card game action so Terry created the scene of the Kid visiting Christian at her parents’ home in the country as a way to humanize his character and to show the audience that there was more to this man than poker. The scene of the two relaxing in the grass near a babbling brook brought out the sweet side of the Kid that was hidden behind his steelyeyed poker face during the card games or interacting with Stoner. One of the scenes Jewison had to re-shoot was a scene which purportedly got Peckinpah in trouble with the producers: Slade in bed with his mistress. Terry re-wrote it and insisted the mistress had to be an AfricanAmerican. Growing up in the South, Terry was very familiar with rich, hypocritical businessmen like Slade who were bigots on the outside but had secret black lovers. Despite the gains African-Americans were making during the Civil Rights Movement, the studio was very nervous about including this scene. Though she had no lines, actress Mimi Dillard was a bit of a pioneer for taking the role. While Terry was still involved in pre-production on The Cincinnati Kid and rewriting the script, I donned yet another bikini and headed to the sands of Santa Monica for my third beach movie, Beach Ball. It was produced by actor Bart Patton who was involved in the production of my prior beach movie The Girls on the Beach and directed by Lennie Weinrib, who was also a comic. The leads were Edd Byrnes, who was very popular at this time due to his playing hipster Kookie on the TV series 77 Sunset Strip, and Chris Noel whom I worked with previously on Girl Happy. She was darling and such a pretty girl. Edd was such a big star at this time that I remember thinking, “What the hell is he doing in this crummy movie?” Aron Kincaid, my costar in The Girls on the Beach, was also in this. He was a sweetheart and had that typical Southern California beach boy look back then. I think he got even handsomer as he aged. He has a very rugged look to him nowadays. I always was attracted to “older” men. Chris and I, along with Mikki Jamison and Brenda Benet, played nerdy coeds who as members of their college’s finance committee get tricked by Edd into granting him a student loan which he intends to use to buy musical instruments for his band mates, Aron, Robert Logan, and Don Edmonds. After realizing we’ve been bamboozled, we drop the nerd act, slip into bikinis and try to entice the boys to return to college. The film ends with the guys in drag being chased by the police at a car show as they try to slip on stage to perform in a Battle of the Bands contest. I enjoyed working on Beach Ball very much. The girls on this movie got

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I’m at left plotting with Mikki Jamison, Chris Noel, and Brenda Benet to trick our dropout boyfriends to return to college in Beach Ball (Paramount, 1965). Courtesy Aron Kincaid.

along so much better than those “girls on the beach.” I especially adored Brenda Benet. We had worked together previously in Harum Scarum. She was such a good Catholic girl and lived in the Valley. Before I moved in with Terry, I used to drive her back and forth to the studio. Years later I was so saddened when I learned that she committed suicide due to the guilt she felt over the accidental death of her son with Bill Bixby. Beach Ball was the opposite of The Girls on the Beach as the guys turned out to be troublesome. I was paired with Robert Logan who didn’t seem that interested in acting. He was off in a flash to do something else whenever we finished a scene. Poor Chris had so much trouble with Byrnes, who was coming on to her. They had a kissing scene and he kept ramming his tongue down her throat. Fed up, she went to the director and threatened to quit if he didn’t get Edd to stop. Luckily for me, Logan didn’t cause me any problems other than his lack of interest in making the movie. I remember Chris, Mikki, Brenda and I had a funny scene together in our dorm room. The costume designer put us in these horrible old-fashioned pajamas. Our hair was combed schoolmarm-style and we wore nerdy

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glasses. One of the girls wanted to send the boys to jail for deceiving us but it was decided that we go back to their beach house and convince them to re-enroll in school. Of course we had to beautify ourselves to get their attention. As usual I was costumed mostly in bikinis and fully clothed in layers of body makeup, constantly trailed by a woman wielding a wet sponge and dabbing away at me. A lot of actresses at the time who worked with me in these teenage movies felt exploited. Being a bit older than the other girls, and having done sketch comedy in Canada, I knew where I was and what I was doing so I never felt exploited in the least. I didn’t even mind posing for promotional pin-up photos that they used to make us do. To me it was just part of the job but I know it bothered a lot of the other girls. But I will say, some of the positions the always male photographers asked me to get into were really awkward with your head tilted back and your body angled to the left or right. Most ridiculous is when they asked you to wear a bikini with high heels! I never knew one woman who wore that in real life. But realizing that these photos were fantasy pictures for male fans, I just did what I was told and had fun with it. I can honestly say that I was having a beach ball! After filming wrapped, I almost immediately started my next film Vil-

Mikki Jamison, Aron Kincaid, me, Robert Logan, Edd Byrnes and Chris Noel looking confused on the sands of Santa Monica in Beach Ball. Courtesy Aron Kincaid.

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lage of the Giants, which was loosely based on H.G. Wells’ Food of the Gods. It was produced and directed by Bert I. Gordon who previously gave the world The Amazing Colossal Man and Attack of the Puppet People. I joined a number of children of the stars including Lloyd Bridges’ son Beau Bridges, Ann Sothern and Robert Sterling’s gorgeous daughter Tisha Sterling, and Mickey Rooney’s pensive seventeen-year-old son Tim Rooney plus Joy Harmon, Vicki London, and Bob Random to play reckless teenagers who grow to gigantic proportions after ingesting “goo” conjured up by ten-year-old Ronny Howard (nicknamed “Genius”) and terrorize a town. We then battle good teens Tommy Kirk, Charla Doherty, Johnny Crawford from TV’s The Rifleman, and go-go dancer Toni Basil of “Mickey” fame. Terry came to the set of Village of the Giants one day and hit it off with big-eyed blonde Joy Harmon. He had met her previously on The Loved One where she had a tiny role as an aspiring starlet. Joy was a sweet girl but she was so formidable and so big in so many ways, I was a bit put off by her. But Terry was just drawn to larger-than-life people and thought she was wonderful. Joy was so full of energy. Tisha Sterling was the prettiest thing I ever saw. Beau Bridges was just a kid then but so charming. If I ever meet him again, I would hate to say—because he has done some wonderful, fine work— that not only did we work together on Village of the Giants but I was the blonde who licked his face during the dance scene in the mud. He’d probably take out a gun and shoot me! In a scene where we are hiding in this abandoned theater, I hear some rock music in the distance. My line was “Dig that nitty gritty.” I had no idea what it meant; I was so not hip regarding teenage culture in regards to music and dance crazes. Joy Harmon, on the other hand, loved the scenes set in the discothèque where she could shimmy with abandon. She frequented the Whisky A Go-Go on the Sunset Strip (where we filmed) religiously so she was right at home dancing to the songs performed by The Beau Brummels in the movie. I had no idea who they were and disliked their music so not surprisingly there aren’t many shots of me during these scenes. One day the producers came to Joy, Vicki and me before we shot the scene where our characters grow giant size. They wanted to show us popping out of our clothes and asked if we minded being nude for it though we would cover our breasts with our arms. I never had any qualms with nudity so I readily said yes. Joy did too but Vicki refused. She was a sweet girl and this was 1964 so her reluctance was understandable to me but unfortunately for her not the producer. I guess to punish Vicki, they didn’t use her at all in those scenes and at one point shot her in silhouette from behind a screen. Beach Ball and Village of the Giants were released almost simultaneously. Neither film raced up the box office charts or impressed the critics very

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Beau Bridges, Joy Harmon, Bob Random, Tisha Sterling, me, and Vicki London as oversized delinquents laughing at “the little people” in Village of the Giants (Embassy, 1965).

much. The most notoriety Village of the Giants received was for its ad campaign featuring Johnny Crawford dangling from the giant bosom of Joy Harmon. But for what these films were—wholesome entertainment for the non-discriminating drive-in crowd—they were well liked by the teenage set and are warmly remembered by fans even to this day. However, I have to admit I never saw these movies when first released or for that matter anything else I appeared in. Unlike Terry’s movies that had big premieres,

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mine just barely snuck into the drive-ins. I had performed so much of my life on stage where you cannot see yourself that when I began appearing on TV and in movies I just didn’t think about it. Terry for all his encouragement of me to keep acting also never actually saw me perform. We never made an effort to seek out my films when released to theaters. We were living our lives and were in the moment. I thought Village of the Giants would come and go, never to be heard from again. You can imagine my amazement when I was recently contacted by a fan named Michael Howe, who created this elaborate website devoted entirely to the movie and even a page on my career. From him I learned that the producers had negotiated with Mattel to produce Village of the Giants dolls a la Barbie. A mock-up of me as a doll was even included in the pressbook. Terry would have laughed over this for sure. I never recall anyone discussing this with us back then. Since the movie was not a huge hit, the dolls were never produced. Good thing as I could think of one person, who shall remain nameless, who would have probably bought one of me to stick pins into as their own personal voodoo doll. When filming began on The Cincinnati Kid, Terry was on the set every day as he was with The Loved One. All the interior scenes were shot first on the back lot of MGM before going on location to New Orleans (where the movie was set) for the exteriors. Ann-Margret and Tuesday Weld both showed up on the set with blond hair and Terry felt that you couldn’t tell them apart, so Ann-Margret happily became a redhead. Terry was most pleased with a scene he wrote for Ann-Margret where she is sitting on a bed doing a jigsaw puzzle, and with tiny scissors and a nail file she trimmed the pieces to fit. It was a great cinematic moment because the audience really could get the feel and motivation of this character based on this simple action. She was a wanton woman who would cheat and connive to get what she wanted. Terry didn’t interact with the cast as much as he did on The Loved One but he did confer a number of times with Steve McQueen on his dialogue. Terry really liked McQueen and was impressed with his performance. Terry also worked very closely with Norman Jewison and found him quite professional and pleasant. Knowing Norman was from Canada like me, Terry came home one day and asked what he could say to Norman that only another Canadian would know about. I had the perfect example so the next day Terry walked up to Norman and whispered to him that he received a phone call from Mavor Moore, who was a famous local theater impresario in Toronto. Norman laughed and said, “How do you know Mavor?” But then he quickly remembered that I was Canadian and realized Terry was playing a joke. When the cast and crew flew off to New Orleans, I had a break in my

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work schedule and got to go along. I rode in a wagon from the plane to the terminal with Edward G. Robinson, his wife and a lot of luggage. Once we were settled in the hotel, I never saw them again. This was my first trip to the fabled New Orleans, and I had my first Oysters Rockefeller and strolled around the French Quarter by myself while everyone was working. One morning, trying to make myself useful on the set, I offered to get coffee. When I got back carrying the cups on a tray, I saw a crowd of people milling around a black sedan. I realized that Ann-Margret and Tuesday Weld were trapped inside, and people were pushing and rocking the car. The girls were huddled in the back seat, and there was no driver. It was like a scene out of Day of the Locust. My fear of celebrity hit the top of the chart that morning. In the movie, Terry and Norman Jewison wanted to show the loneliness and isolation of the Steve McQueen character after his girlfriend has deserted him just before the big poker tournament. Norman suggested they show Steve walking through the streets of the French Quarter. Terry wrote the scene but set it at night with rain so audiences would really feel this guy’s pain and trepidation. The producer hit the roof because of the expense of filming a scene like this on location. Having typed “rain” in the script, Terry didn’t realize what that little word would entail for the crew. They had to set up rain in the garden behind the legendary Preservation Hall. It was a long and arduous task. At sundown, after watching this incredible set-up, I had my first Hurricane, a rum drink that is a New Orleans staple made with lime juice and passion fruit syrup. It was served in an oversize glass with an umbrella in it. I sat sipping my sweet, delicious rum-filled cocktail while admiring the lush green garden filled with flowering bushes, and the gentle rain that Terry had ordered up. The cast and crew were crammed inside the tiny hall with hot movie lights shooting a scene. I heard a blues song emanating from Preservation Hall and I became so entranced with it that I began swaying to the rhythms while sipping the last of my drink. Before long it was nightfall. I looked up and saw Steve McQueen walking down the lane toward Preservation Hall. He stopped and peered in the window at the revelry going on inside. Steve had such a pensive look on his face that I thought it would be a good idea to join him and see what was going on. Quick as lightning, I got up and rushed to his side. I looked in and to my shock came almost face to face with a great big movie camera zooming in for a close-up of the star of the movie! Then I heard Norman Jewison yell in frustration, “Cut” and I realized what I had done. This was the last shot of a very long day and the exhausted crew was not amused with my innocent curiosity. Terry quickly hustled me out of there. After all was said and done, Terry vowed that he would never again type the word “rain” without thinking about it first.

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The Cincinnati Kid has always been called inferior to The Hustler (with Paul Newman as pool shark Fast Eddie who challenges reigning champ Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats), but in my opinion it was much more daring. The climactic poker hand builds in tension and the audience is led to believe that the McQueen character will triumph over the aging champ. When he doesn’t, it is a major surprise. Most movies at that time had the requisite happy ending. Terry felt his biggest challenge in writing the screenplay was making the final card game as exciting as the pool game between Newman and Gleason in The Hustler. Terry was a great poker player and with Norman worked out the logistics of that final hand. What made it especially exciting were the then-inventive quick cuts from the poker players to the cards to the anxious spectators, some of whom had large wagers on the outcome. After he reveals a full house only to lose to Robinson’s straight flush, a dejected McQueen heads out into the alleyway to get some air and is challenged again by the shoeshine boy. He loses to the boy and the movie wraps with a close-up of his face. That is the ending envisioned by Jewison and Terry. MGM, worried that it was just too much of a downer, tacked on one last scene where McQueen turns a corner and walks into the forgiving arms of Tuesday Weld. The studio wrongly felt that they had to at least let the Kid win the girl though she had walked out on him. Norman and Terry created a very personal film where the hero’s choices not only affect him but the people around him. Critics took notice and The Cincinnati Kid won much praise but it was not a huge box office hit as expected especially with Steve McQueen as the star. Come awards time, the movie was unjustly passed over though Joan Blondell, who played a card dealer named Lady Fingers, was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and was voted Best Supporting Actress by the National Board of Review. Terry was pleased with the film and had enjoyed working with Norman Jewison and the cast. A brilliant satirist, Terry proved with The Cincinnati Kid that he could write a classic American dramatic screenplay. However, Hollywood only seemed interested in having him create his trademark biting dialogue for satires and spoofs.

3. Paging Dr. Southern When I first came to Hollywood in November 1963, Sunset Boulevard was deserted—there were hardly any pedestrians at all. At the famous Ciro’s Supper Club, the sign on the front door read that it was open only for “Banquets, Weddings and Receptions.” Needing to pick up my union card from the Screen Actors Guild, I decided to walk from my hotel. As I strolled smartly down Sunset Boulevard clad Toronto-style in a red dress, beret, and heels, I could hear brakes squealing and the soft thump of the occasional collision. I thought, “Boy, these people are bad drivers,” and never thought it was my fault because they weren’t used to seeing pedestrians sauntering along the street. Two years later, in the summer of 1965, Terry and I were living in an apartment on the top floor of the Chateau Marmont overlooking all of downtown Los Angeles. Sunset Boulevard had exploded into a sea of trendy discothèques with the sidewalks crammed with people hopping from club to club. I hung out a lot with Tina Aumont, the daughter of the French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont and the Spanish beauty Maria Montez (a movie star in the Forties). Tina was born in Los Angeles but was raised in Paris after her mother died in 1951 and was in town to play an Indian maiden in the western Texas Across the River opposite Dean Martin and Alain Delon. While staying in LA, Tina rented a beach house way up the Pacific Coast Highway, at Zuma Beach in Malibu. A brunette beauty with big expressive eyes and a sensuous though innocent look to her, nineteen-year-old Tina was married at the time to French actor Christian Marquand, almost twenty years her senior, and Terry’s friend from his Paris days. Terry would tell me stories about Christian and his buddy filmmaker Roger Vadim, whom he met at a Parisian café in the early Fifties. He was going to the Sorbonne at the time on the GI Bill. Marquand and Vadim were infamous playboys known for stalking all the pretty girls around the city. One of those beauties was Stella Adler’s daughter Ellen Adler. Terry fondly dubbed her “the most beautiful girl in Paris.” Ellen lived with a “French Intellectual,” which made her sophisticated and mysterious in Terry’s eyes. He first met Ellen in a bar that had a television showing the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. “Mommy said it looks just like the opera Boris Godunov,” she said to him. 45

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Whenever Christian and Terry were out of town, Tina and I would relax at her serene seaside bungalow to escape the monotony of Sunset Boulevard. One day Tina told me she wanted to show me something when her trunk came from Paris. After it arrived she was eager to share with me the suicide note left by her mother when Tina was an infant. It was a note addressed to Tina and I remember it said something like, “My beautiful daughter, I want to explain to you why I must die.” It seemed that Tina had kept the letter close to her all of her young life, and now she wanted to share it with me. I didn’t know what to say, as I only knew her a short time and I wasn’t prepared to see something so personal. We continued to unpack her trunk and planned to make dinner at the beach house. Tina never learned how to cook; being raised in France, it just came naturally. She told me that she would trust me with the mushrooms even though I didn’t know my way around the kitchen. Christian phoned, and then Terry called, checking up on us to make sure that we weren’t entertaining any gentleman callers. Terry’s jealousy once again surfaced and he did not believe that there weren’t any guys in the house. By the time I was able to convince him and get off the phone, the mushrooms had burnt. Tina had a roaring fire going in the fireplace and a couple of open bottles of red wine breathing on the hearth. After we ate dinner and drank most of the wine, Tina announced that she had scored some LSD. In 1965 it wasn’t illegal yet, and Timothy Leary was lecturing all over town about its benefits. I was dubious, but Tina put some mellow music on and we took the acid. I soon felt strange chemical sensations rushing through my bloodstream. It was not an unpleasant experience, but I never did it again. Soon the sun came up and the acid was wearing off. The ocean looked like molten gold glistening in the morning sun. Tina, a girl with a lot of “good” ideas, decided she wanted to go get a hot dog even though I am sure she had never eaten one in her entire life. It was only eight-thirty in the morning and I tried to explain to her that it was traffic time on the Pacific Coast Highway. Furthermore, the hot dog stands wouldn’t open for hours yet, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer so we got into my yellow Skylark convertible with the top down and wheeled out into the highway with the rest of the morning commuters heading for their offices while we were searching for a wiener stand. They were all closed as I expected. Driving in traffic coming down from an acid trip was soooo not a good idea but luckily we made it back to her house safely. A few weeks later, I was simultaneously watching the Watts Riots one afternoon from my living room window at the Chateau Marmont, and on a black-and-white TV where I saw desperate people stepping out of broken plate glass windows carrying couches and appliances. Tina called me because

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she had another “brilliant” notion. She said, “We have to see Watts Towers.” I tried to explain to the impetuous girl that there was a riot going on down there, but Tina said, “No, it’ll be fine, Gail.” Watts Towers are a forest of tall stalagmites made of broken glass that had been erected by a retired Italian artisan who had lived in the neighborhood. They are a sight to see, so I picked up Tina at the beach house and we drove all the way back to Watts the day after the riots had ended. We got lost, and were driving around and around in circles. Women were coming out of their neat houses with arms folded, to see these two dippy starlets in a yellow convertible driving around aimlessly. After about an hour of this, two nice young men asked if they could help us, so we told them we were looking for the Watts Towers. “Follow us, ladies,” they said, so we did. Soon we were there, where our escorts charged us admission. We gladly paid them, grateful for their help even though we knew it didn’t cost anything to see the Towers. After we had completed our tour, they guided us safely out of the neighborhood. Terry returned home from (I think) a magazine writing assignment, and we started to get into the Sunset Boulevard club scene. We went to the Whisky A Go-Go, where girls danced in cages overhead and the music was blasting. One time we saw Ike and Tina Turner perform and I was so impressed by the gyrating Tina clad in a blonde wig and tasseled mini-dress. We also would dine at the first vegetarian restaurant in LA, The Aware Inn, with our good friends William Claxton and his wife Peggy Moffitt. One of the Sixties’ top models, she sported a unique modified bowl cut called the “Five Point” and was fashion designer Rudi Gernreich’s favorite to model his futuristic designs, including the first topless swimsuit. Our favorite restaurant, which became our regular hangout, was Matteo’s, located in Beverly Hills. We would sit at a long red banquette, and after a few glasses of wine Terry would hold court telling various stories, such as the one he had heard that the Vatican had a larger collection of erotica than King Farouk. Though my relationship with Terry kept me busy, I still found time to go out on auditions that my agent Sam Armstrong was still vigorously arranging for me. At one reading, the director told me I did a good job but they were looking for a star like Diane McBain. I thought, “Who the hell is Diane McBain?!” One of my last acting jobs before I quit was an episode of the steamy primetime drama The Long Hot Summer, based on the novel by William Faulkner though the series was more Peyton Place than Faulkner. I was cast as the love interest of the TV show’s star Roy Thinnes. Terry insisted that I do a Southern accent for this as the series was set in Mississippi. I went

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through all my lines learning this great dialect. We got on the set and it didn’t work on that level. As long as I was in the scene with Thinnes, his accent was fine. But when I wasn’t in a scene with him, he lost it. On TV back then, the directors were satisfied if you just hit your mark and knew your lines. They weren’t interested in trying to get a performance out of you. My Southern accent threw them off. If Thinnes had a close-up, I had to be sure to be out of camera range to feed him my lines. Most times the script girl or another crew member would do this. In the early spring of 1966, Terry received a phone call from talent agent Gareth Wigan telling him that Peter Sellers wanted to hire him to write his dialogue only for the James Bond spoof Casino Royale. Peter was a huge admirer of Terry’s novel The Magic Christian and, a few years earlier, had bought a hundred copies to give to friends. One of the recipients was Stanley Kubrick, who was in pre-production on what would turn out to be Dr. Strangelove, based on a novel by Peter George called Red Alert. Kubrick soon realized that the end of the world could not be treated as melodrama, and remembered the satirical The Magic Christian. He phoned Terry and sent him a ticket to London. Kubrick would pick Terry up in his Rolls or Bentley at four-thirty in the morning and they would write that day’s shooting script on the way to the studio. Terry always said that this was his most satisfying screenwriting experience. And the most luxurious as the giant car had pulldown desks with reading lights, plush seats, and blinds on the windows. Peter was insistent on having Terry write his Casino Royale dialogue. It was an odd request to script only one character’s lines but since the money was good ($25,000), Terry eagerly accepted the offer. We got on a plane for the long flight from LA to London and it occurred to me that I didn’t have any cash on me. I asked Terry if he had any. He said blithely that he didn’t, but there would be a car to meet us. Terry had a very loose way about him and could just pick-up-and-go without a care in the world. Being Canadian, I wasn’t used to that. But he was right and there was the car, which took us to the Dorchester Hotel. I fell into my first featherbed and slept ’til dawn. I was awakened by shouts of people from down the street protesting in front of the American Embassy. That very night we went to Robert Fraser’s art gallery, which later Terry dubbed “Robert Fraser’s Art Gallery and Grill.” Terry was previously introduced to Fraser by Dennis Hopper. Thinking himself somewhat of an art connoisseur, Terry had started his own modest collection. We wanted to see a Colin Self sculpture, which the artist said was inspired by Dr. Strangelove. It was a nest of missiles. Terry bought it but since we were traveling so much he left it at the gallery. It mysteriously disappeared and we had no idea who stole it.

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Robert, who Terry nicknamed “Groovy Bob,” was young, dashing and a noted modern art dealer. His gallery was one of the first to display artists’ work hanging on plain white walls. He is credited with helping to launch the careers of Andy Warhol, Peter Blake, Jim Dine, and Richard Hamilton, among others. While we were pushing the buzzer to Robert’s gallery with no answer, a flamboyantly dressed gentleman named Michael Cooper came along. Terry described his first impressions of Michael in a tribute article titled “Memories of Michael,” reprinted in Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950–1995: “Looking for Robert, are you?” asked the young dandy, and when I turned I saw something I was to come to love—his extraordinary smile, piercing; and somehow both shy and knowing, almost conspiratorial.... His smile was absolutely enchanting.

I too was just completely infatuated with this young, skinny little English guy within seconds of meeting him. Michael told us Robert was probably off in Meerakesh “having a right rave-up” but when he realized it was Thursday he knew Robert was “having tea with his mum” as was his weekly custom. He then took us to Robert’s flat on Mount Street, which he had a key to. Michael was a photographer extraordinaire, and one of a small group of Robert’s friends who met every night at his flat. Terry and I became regulars there as well after meeting Robert and being simply enchanted by him. He was very formal and elegant but he was also quiet and had an unassuming quality about him. Sometimes I’d catch him looking at me with a bemused expression on his face. I felt he liked me a lot though he was completely gay. Keeping with his proper upbringing, he always dressed less ostentatiously than all his straight male friends who hung out with him. Robert loved American soul music, and performers such as Booker T. and the MGs, Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, and Otis Redding were being played constantly at his parties on small 45s. Michael Cooper, who usually was the one who supplied the records for Robert, would do a strange herkyjerky movement to the beat of the music, often all alone. Then some other person would get up by himself and also start moving this same way. Being a classically trained ballerina, this way of dancing seemed very odd to me even though I did my fair share of shimmying in my beach movies. I also had never heard soul music before and it seemed one didn’t need a partner to dance to it. Groovy Bob’s place became the major hangout in “swinging Sixties London” with lots of liquor, drugs, and even great conversation. Michael’s camera was flashing all the time, wine flowed like water, and there were large “spiffs” of pot or hashish bigger than a cigar. I would swoon and fall over high as a kite just from the fumes in the room.

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Terry really liked Robert and Michael, who got along grandly as they complemented each other’s personalities perfectly. Terry said it best when he described Michael as “a grand eccentric” and Robert as “a sort of older brother of conservative stamp,” which was sort of ironic since Robert was a homosexual and Michael was straight. I thought Robert was so sweet, especially in the way he would look out for the more adventurous Michael. He was very protective of his young friend. These barriers between gays and straights began breaking down during the Sixties. In the world of ballet we never had them to begin with. One night Anita Pallenberg arrived at Robert’s place with Brian Jones. She was a fashion model and actress, and he was the founder and lead guitarist for the Rolling Stones. Brian and Anita sort of looked alike, with white blond bowl haircuts and long legs. Anita’s skirts were quite short, stopping just below her butt, and she wore flat shoes. They would dance the same moves as Michael, sometimes relating to each other, but never touching. Brian, who was very intellectual, was just fascinated with Terry and would engage him in what Terry liked best—conversation. Brian was eager to have deep philosophical debates on almost any subject with Terry amidst the din of the loud music. Occasionally an experimental film would be shown, including one by filmmaker Bruce Conner where Jackie Kennedy endlessly opened a door to a hearse at the funeral procession of the dead president. We would then decide to go to dinner, maybe or maybe not before midnight, either way much too late for the Old Guard of London. Everybody would stream into a flotilla of cars with Robert leading the way carrying a stack of 45s. Cooper had decked out Fraser’s mini-car with a turntable in the glove compartment, perhaps the first unofficial car “tape deck.” Terry and I would squeeze into Robert’s tiny automobile with the music blasting, heading for some staid restaurant that couldn’t send us away because Robert’s father had been a peer and a member of the House of Lords. We would troupe in, maybe fifteen people. The kitchen was re-opened, and we were tucked as far away from the other diners as possible, a back room or, better yet, an upstairs dining room. We all looked like exotic birds with our Carnaby Street fashions, especially the men, who wore feathers, and gold lamé, and pink velvet jackets. The ancient English waiters wore white gloves and stood behind each chair wishing for the olden days when Englishmen knew how to dress—and when to go to dinner! One night Anita got very excited when she spotted “Hash Potatoes” on the menu. Unfortunately for her, it was not the kind of hash she was craving. Michael Cooper was a very skilled photographer and much sought-after in London. Terry always felt the character played by David Hemmings in

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Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up was based on Michael and not David Bailey (a highly influential celebrity photographer who helped create the whole “Swinging London of the ’60s” vibe) as most people assumed. Michael was friends with both The Rolling Stones and The Beatles and in 1967 both groups hired him to shoot an album cover: Their Satanic Majesties Request for the Stones and most memorably Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for The Beatles. Michael had asked Terry if he could use a photo of him in sunglasses in the Sgt. Pepper collage. Of course, Terry gave his permission. Created by Robert Fraser and designed by Peter Blake and his wife Jann Haworth, the cover collage featured many famous people clad in colorful military uniforms, surrounding The Beatles. Terry is in the second row from the top, fourth from the left in between poet Dylan Thomas and singer Dion. It was a great privilege to be selected to be on the face of the album but Terry just took it in stride and never made a big deal of it. Terry loved to just get on a plane and travel without any planning. Michael was the same way and I think a bit more carefree as, even if he didn’t have any money, his magnetic personality always helped him get by. Terry so admired that quality in him. While Terry spent the nights carousing around with London’s hippest crowd, the days were spent working. Casino Royale was the only James Bond movie not produced by Cubby Broccoli. Somehow producer Charles Feldman got hold of this Ian Fleming property and decided to make a lavish, big budget spoof keeping the title and throwing out the story. It took five directors and God knows how many writers to come up with this Sixties pop art camp fest. Sean Connery was nowhere to be found, lucky for him, but instead there was Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, David Niven, Ursula Andress, Joanna Pettet, Barbara Bouchet, and Orson Welles as the villain. The convoluted plot had something to do with the evil organization SMERSH trying to take over the world. When David Niven as the James Bond won’t come out of retirement to help smash SMERSH, practically the rest of the cast begins impersonating Bond to confuse the enemy ... and the audience. Terry was summoned by Peter Sellers because he disliked Woody Allen and Orson Welles and wanted to make sure he upstaged them. One scene in particular had Peter and Orson’s characters going head to head at Baccarat and Peter wanted to make sure he had the wittiest dialogue. Who better than Terry Southern to write it? Sellers also wouldn’t set foot on the set with Orson and they had to shoot their scenes separately, creating havoc for the poor director, Joe McGrath, who was such a nice guy. Exasperated, he pleaded with Sellers, “But Peter—it’s Panavision,” but to no avail. The Dorchester Hotel seemed to be the main meeting place for the people working on Casino Royale. There’s a small newsstand off the lobby and

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Terry loved telling this story of what happened there one morning. Apparently Peter was buying a newspaper when a young American agent walked in and mistook Peter for one of his agency’s clients, Woody Allen. He introduced himself to Peter whom he thought was Woody and immediately remarked that he heard that there was a lot of friction on the set due to Peter Sellers, who was an “arrogant asshole.” Peter played along, agreeing with him, but the agent didn’t stop there and went on to call Peter everything from “stupid fucking limey” to “washed-up.” “Orson Welles won’t even be in the same shot as him,” continued the oblivious agent on a roll. Peter nodded, paid for his paper, and left. He then told Terry and a handful of other people. The story spread like wildfire. Soon after, Peter in a huff walked off the movie greatly disrupting the shooting schedule. Another Dorchester incident was described to us when we were at a small gathering at Shirley MacLaine’s penthouse apartment. She had ordered an omelet earlier through room service and when she called to complain that her eggs were cold, a snooty waiter said if she wanted her food hot she should get a room closer to the kitchen. Shirley was in town because she was supposed to play Mata Bond in the movie but at the last minute she changed her mind. Charles Feldman then cast Joanna Pettet in the part. She had just co-starred in his movie The Group and he had an option to use her in a second film. Purportedly, Pettet didn’t want to do it and begged to be released. Feldman held firm and unfortunately she was stuck working in Casino Royale. One night we took a break from hanging out with Bob Fraser’s groovy crowd and Terry dragged me to a boxing match. Terry sparred as a boy, and was very good at it. Though he had long given up the sport, he walked on the balls of his feet, like a dancer or a boxer in the ring, and always wore rubber-soled shoes. Terry somehow got us expensive ringside seats to the Muhammad Ali–Henry Cooper WBC Heavyweight Title bout. Cooper was an Englishman with blondish hair and white alabaster skin. He was soon covered with bright red blood after taking some hard jabs from Ali, who pranced around him. From the floor near the ring, I could hear someone chanting, “Dance, Ali, dance,” over and over again, like a mantra. I asked Terry who kept repeating that and he pointed to Ali’s trainer and corner man, Angelo Dundee, who Terry thought was a hoofer at one time. I found this carnage to be barbaric and distasteful but Terry was enjoying himself. Ali won by TKO to Terry’s delight and my indifference. Terry loved being a screenwriter because he loved the cinema. When asked why he liked to write for film, he’d reply, “Because if you read about a car accident it is once removed whereas if you actually see the accident it has more effect on you.” While in London he wanted to introduce me to some

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of his favorite movies. We went to see a screening of the controversial thriller Peeping Tom (1960), directed by the esteemed Michael Powell (this film nearly ruined his career). Terry was fascinated with the subject matter: A young man was used by his eccentric scientist father in a series of experiments to study fear, waking the child in the middle of the night by scaring him. When the abused boy grows up, he begins murdering young women while filming them to get their dying expressions of fear for his home movies. Another favorite of Terry’s was Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). He just loved the idea of a man playing chess against the Grim Reaper while trying to find the answers about life, death, and God. After Terry finished writing Peter Sellers’ lines for Casino Royale, we flew to Paris to meet with Roger Vadim and his wife Jane Fonda. Vadim was most famous for his romances with Catherine Deneueve and Jane, and for directing his then-wife Brigitte Bardot in the notorious And God Created Woman (1956), which made her an international sex goddess. Jane, the daughter of Henry Fonda, was not yet a super-star but she was on the top echelon of young Hollywood leading ladies, a list that included Ann-Margret, Tuesday Weld, Suzanne Pleshette, Yvette Mimieux, Stella Stevens, and Carol Lynley, who all seemed on the verge of major stardom and were just waiting for that one part to take them to the top. For most that film role never came, but it did for Jane. Terry had known Vadim from the time he spent in Paris during the early Fifties. They were meeting to discuss Terry writing the screenplay for Barbarella. Tackling a science-fiction comedy based on a comic book would be a new challenge for Terry and he was interested in doing it. We were put up at the Grand Hotel, and then we went to meet Vadim. When we walked into their suite, Jane was sewing ribbons on a pair of brand new pointe shoes. I was impressed, but did not ask her about ballet even though I knew she studied dance. As with Rod Steiger, I sometimes became shy around people. Vadim was tall, dark, and handsome with a sexy ruggedness to him. I thought he and Jane made a lovely couple. She was quiet and thoughtful and had no airs about her whatsoever. While meeting to discuss Barbarella, Vadim informed Terry that he first had to film La Curée with Jane. In the movie, Jane was to play the spoiled American wife of an older, rich Parisian businessman; she begins an affair with his son who betrays her. Coincidentally, our good friend Tina Aumont had a part in the movie too. Vadim asked Terry for a quick rewrite and Terry told him he had to think about it. Later Terry decided he had too much work on his plate and would recommend that his good friend William Burroughs, who was living in London, revise the screenplay so he could make a little money. A prominent member of the Beat Generation, Burroughs had

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authored such cult novels as the semi-autobiographical Junkie and Naked Lunch, both having drug addicted narrators as the central character. The once great and openly gay author was fighting a drug addiction and supporting himself (and his habit) by writing articles for small literary presses. Burroughs had been depressed because he recently lost his longtime companion. Terry made plans to meet later with Vadim and Jane to discuss the screenplay for Barbarella, the project he was most interested in, and to see if they would be open to Burroughs tackling screenplay duties for La Curée. Terry passed on Vadim’s offer to script La Curée because he was working on the screenplay for A Clockwork Orange, based on the novel by Anthony Burgess. It was a futuristic tale about a fifteen-year-old named Alex and his hooligan friends who with their own language called Nadsat roam the streets of London at night committing violent acts. Alex is eventually arrested and, while in prison, volunteers for a new technique that promises that after two weeks the prisoner will be released and will never commit violence again. The last third of the novel follows Alex’s return to society and how he deals with his life after undergoing the treatment. This turned out to be another case of a missed opportunity for Terry. While we were in London, Michael Cooper gave a copy of the book to Terry because he thought it would make a great movie. Terry read it and agreed. He sent a copy to director Stanley Kubrick, who passed on it because he felt the slang lingo created by Burgess for his teenage hoods would be unintelligible to the mainstream public. Terry showed the book to Si Litvinoff, his business manager at the time. Si was well-respected and his impressive roster of clients included Andy Warhol, Jerry Leiber, and Beatrice Arthur. He met Terry during the early Sixties due to his association with writer Jack Gelber, who was also his client. Jack worked with publisher Richard Seaver of Grove Press. Si suggested that Terry take an option out on it. Having saved money from his previous screenwriting jobs, Terry was able to do it for one year at $1,000 against a purchase price of $10,000. Terry wrote the script with Michael Cooper while we were in London and began trying to get producers interested in it. Before they could go a step further, Terry had to have his screenplay approved by the Lord Chamberlain, the British censor of film and theater. Terry’s package was returned unopened with a note that said something along the lines of, “I know the book and there’s no point in reading this script because it involves youthful defiance of authority and we’re not doing that.” This derailed Terry’s hopes of getting his screenplay made into a film in London. However, a number of people read the screenplay and felt it had real cinematic appeal, including Si who recalls:

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When I got the rights for Terry I worked with him trying to set it up with me as a producer. We went together to the after party for the premiere of Blow Up and got David Hemmings to commit to star. I went out to LA with David and got a commitment from John Boorman (who was hot after directing Point Blank) to direct. David and John were both clients of the William Morris Agency and they tried to shop the package to the studios but could never get a deal.

Terry renewed his option on the book one more time but still could not sell his screenplay. When that option ran out, Terry didn’t have the money to renew it so Litvinoff optioned the book. Per Si: When Terry was not going to continue his option I said that I would and that he would still be my partner. To protect him I voluntarily and contractually gave him 50 percent of my share of the profits.

Wisely, Si knew the property had great cinematic appeal. Against his vehement objections, Terry foolishly sold his rights to Max Raab in 1967 for $5,000 plus 10 percent of Raab’s net profits. Max and his brother Norman owned a popular clothing line out of Philadelphia, called Villager. They were famous for bringing the “button-down preppy look” to women during the early Sixties. Terry loved Max and would joke that he hated to be called Max A. Raab because he was Jewish. Terry needed the quick cash to support two households, especially since his wife was living way beyond his means. As luck would have it, Kubrick came a-calling on Terry the following year and wanted to know if he still held the rights to A Clockwork Orange. When Terry told him he didn’t but he knew who did, Kubrick asked Terry not to let on that he (Kubrick) was interested. But Si had already figured out Kubrick was snooping around after his attorney received a phone call from an accountant relative of Kubrick’s asking to buy the rights for $100. Sneaky man, that Kubrick. Despite Litvinoff’s reservations, he and Raab eventually sold the rights but, instead of directly to Kubrick as he insisted, they made the deal through Warner Bros. (“Just to bug his huge ego,” remarked Si. “He was not a grand guy.”) This way, they maintained executive producer credit with profit participation. At the time, they were in preproduction on their own movie version with Nicolas Roeg directing from Terry’s script and Mick Jagger slated to star. Though Terry lost out on selling the book, he sent a copy of his screenplay to Kubrick thinking he would hire him based on their last successful writing partnership. Of course, the egomaniacal Kubrick rejected Terry’s script and didn’t even have the decency to let Terry know personally. Instead he had his office send a note that stated simply, “Mr. Kubrick has decided to try his own hand.” Considering it was Terry who brought the book to Kubrick’s attention and that they had collaborated so brilliantly together on

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Dr. Strangelove, Terry did not deserve to be so cavalierly dismissed by the director. But Kubrick’s snub wasn’t unexpected. He became extremely agitated when Dr. Strangelove was released at the same time Candy was on the best-seller list. Terry received a lot of attention from Hollywood, the press and even, unfortunately, the FBI when Candy was banned. All the praise showered on Terry ruined his friendship with the jealous Kubrick, which saddened Terry. Kubrick even threatened a lawsuit versus MGM and Filmways when they released a promo ad for The Loved One touting Terry Southern as “the writer of Dr. Strangelove.” He defended his actions by belittling Terry’s contribution to his movie. Even so, Terry for some reason always remained loyal to Kubrick and never spoke a bad word about him. When A Clockwork Orange was released, Terry and I went to see it. The movie didn’t change much from Terry’s version. We weren’t the only ones who felt that way. James C. Robertson wrote in his book The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action, 1913–1975 that “the subsequent details show that the Cooper-Southern script was close to the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film.” It seems that Kubrick’s “modus operandi” was to engage several writers, who didn’t know anyone else was working on the project, and then reject them all, and cobble a script together himself. Terry felt since it was an adaptation of a novel that it would be sensible that the screenplays were not too dissimilar and let it go at that. The Clockwork Orange saga resurfaced in 1999, four years after Terry’s death, when his son Nile began making inquiries regarding Terry’s deal with Max Raab. Though I was a co-beneficiary of Terry’s estate, I did not know he was pursuing this matter. Terry never received a dime from Raab’s share of the profits and Nile felt that, based on the agreement he had with Terry, the estate was owed 10 percent of the money Raab made on the movie. Despite that over thirty years had passed since the agreement was made and no claims were ever raised by Terry during his life, Raab’s attorney was quite amiable in settling the matter. After much investigation, the original agreement turned up and it stated “ten percent (10%) of that portion of the net profits accruing to you as a result of the exploitation of such screenplay....” Terry’s agreement with Max only allowed for profit participation if Terry’s script was used in the making of the film. And of course it was not, thanks to Kubrick. It was also learned that Terry received $2,500 and the remainder was excused for a loan Max had made Terry previously. Terry worked with Raab after this on End of the Road and they remained friends for years so it was no surprise to me that Max didn’t cheat Terry out of any royalties. But at the time, I was never consulted. If I was, it may have saved the estate the payment of hefty legal fees. Terry voiced his bitterness about not getting any profits from Easy Rider but not once did he ever mention that the same happened with A Clock-

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work Orange. But to be fair to Nile, considering how much back taxes were owed and the fact that Terry did get screwed out of millions of dollars regarding Easy Rider due to his cavalier attitude regarding business matters, he wanted to make sure no rock was left unturned regarding all of Terry’s past dealings. Back in Paris, we left Vadim and Jane Fonda and went to the apartment of Scottish film director Donald Cammell, whose most notable film was Performance starring Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg. Donald’s girlfriend Debra Dixon, a beautiful blonde model, had just come back from a shopping spree. Anita had bought a feather-light lamb coat dyed many colors. I was so awed by the fabric that the next time I saw Jane I asked her if she would take me to a couture house. She gently mentioned how expensive they were but that she would take me to a more reasonable shop. I didn’t have enough money for a dress there either, but I think I bought a scarf. Terry walked me all over Paris, showing me the Sorbonne, and pointing out where his former professor and “public intellectual” Jean-Paul Sartre lived. Sartre was a renowned author, screenwriter, playwright, critic, and a leading figure in French philosophy. He became extremely popular with the Beat crowd during the Fifties. I could tell Terry just loved his time in France as he was so energetic and full of life as we toured his favorite city. He and I leisurely strolled along the alleyways and visited the cafes where he used to hang out. He excitedly pointed out his former residence where he shared a room with writer James Baldwin, an African-American homosexual who would gain fame for his books and plays dealing with “racial and sexual issues.” His novels included Giovanni’s Room and the autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain. Terry and James had a third roommate—an owl. Terry told me that their place was such a dump that they would wake up about four-thirty in the afternoon and go straight to a bar because the room had no heat. Terry was having a grand old time reminiscing about his young adult life in Gay Paree and wanted to stay another day but our room at the Grand Hotel was no longer available. Debra Dixon recommended a small hotel that her Texas father told her about on her first trip to Paris. She also mentioned that they rented rooms by the hour—uh-oh. Desperate, we decided to check in anyway. The sheets were industrial, there was a gigantic mirror on the wall opposite the bed, and the bathroom was down the hall, but I will never forget the delicious smells wafting through the hallway from the food being prepared in the kitchen by the women who ran the place. On our last night in Paris, Vadim took Jane, Terry and me to the hot spot in the entire city, Régine’s, a disco owned by a fashionable Belgian woman named Régine Zylberberg. A lovely lady, she was famous for found-

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ing the first-ever discothèque the Whisky A Go-Go, in the late Forties. Instead of live bands that were the norm at this time in nightclubs, recorded music was playing and the dance floor was packed. Terry and Vadim were talking about casting for Barbarella when a beautiful young black woman passed by our table on her way to the ladies room. Vadim got excited and shouted, “There is my Black Queen!” In the comic book Barbarella, the Black Queen is evil, not African, but Vadim insisted that Jane and I follow her to the restroom and ask her if she would like a role in his movie. We did, and in French she said that her father was a king and that she would never be allowed to work in the cinema. We returned to the table with the bad news and Vadim was crestfallen. He was not used to being turned down, and in his own city! A pall fell over the table, and though I had never asked for an acting role in my life, I thought I could pull this part off due to my ballet background because it was so stylized. I suggested that perhaps I was right for the part, anything to break the gloom that had descended on the table. Vadim remarked, “Oh, no, Gail, you’re too nice a person to play the Black Queen.” I immediately thought of my friend Anita Pallenberg, who resembled me somewhat but had more sparkle and a more adventurous persona, so I suggested her. A beaming Vadim replied, “What a good idea! I’m so glad I thought of it!” With Vadim back in good spirits, we accompanied Régine to a downstairs room. She was very excited and wanted us to see the latest addition to her club. It was a jukebox with a small screen on it that played music videos. “Scopitone” was a new technology, and we all marveled at it as we watched such performers as Joi Lansing, Dick and Dee Dee, and Bobby Vee sing songs none of us were familiar with. On a whim, Terry decided we should make a jaunt to the Cannes Film Festival even though we had no reservations at any of the hotels. But like Michael Cooper, Terry just liked to up and go. Being a good sport, I just did as I was told. After arriving at the famous playground we went straight to the bar in the Carlton Hotel where we bumped into Max and Mary Raab. The hotel is right on the beach and we watched a gaggle of topless starlets posing for many eager photographers. Terry’s friend Ken Tynan, the famous British drama critic, was also there wearing a suit and complaining about the sun and the sand. We ordered drinks and told Max and Mary that we had no place to stay because we had just decided to come on the spur of the moment. The Carlton was completely booked of course, so they said we could share their room and we could find something in the morning. They were going to the casino at Monte Carlo that evening and asked if we would like to come along. First we had dinner in Marseilles at a restaurant on the beach. We had Bouillabaisse where it was first invented. The

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broth was intense, and saffron colored, and the simple fish was served on the side. It was forever memorable. When we got to the casino I was denied entry because my dress was not fine enough for evening. Mary said not to worry, that she would go inside with Max and Terry and then we would go back to the hotel and she would lend me her dress. She literally gave me the dress off her back to wear and she picked out another frock from her closet. This time they let me in. I was awed by the elegance. The casino was even more sumptuous than the gambling clubs of London. Baccarat was the game being played and I felt like I had wandered into a James Bond movie. I found a small gilt chair up against a wall and sat down to watch the elegant people around me play the hard-to-follow card game. I have never seen women so bejeweled in my life. Glittering giant green emeralds and sparkling diamonds hanging from gorgeously attired ladies’ ears and various other appendages almost blinded me. People talked in hushed tones as the dealer called the game. Near dawn we went back to the hotel and had a short nap before the sun popped up and it was time for breakfast. Terry then made a reservation at the Column Dor, a small inn at the entrance to a tiny ancient walled village called St. Paul de Vence. It was a ten-minute drive up a winding hill through vineyards and our room overlooked rows and rows of grapevines. In the far distance we could see the shimmering waters of the Mediterranean Sea. We ate outside, and old men played Bocci on the plaza. I wandered through the village, which looked like a movie set. We then went back down to Cannes. Terry wanted to show me Picasso’s house in a nearby village, which he had visited many years ago with avant-garde poet, novelist, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. There was nobody home and the place was locked up. We went back to the boulevard in Cannes and bumped into a young actor named Jack Nicholson, who was not yet famous but was very enterprising. He had starred in two westerns directed by Monte Hellman back to back, using the same cast and set, but different stories. One of them, Ride in the Whirlwind, was from a screenplay written by Jack. He was eager to show them and wanted Terry to come to a screening. Prissy Ken Tynan was still suffering with the sun and the heat and was eager to return to England so Terry politely declined Jack’s invitation. Our stay in Europe continued as we departed Cannes for London and checked into the Grosvenor House. Terry arranged to meet William Burroughs to discuss rewriting the screenplay for La Curée even though he worried that the great writer would be offended to be offered such a hack job. On the contrary, Burroughs was delighted, much to Terry’s relief. Terry gave him a copy of the script and they immediately began discussing the story. As

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usual, I sat there quietly and listened to them excitedly exchange ideas. Burroughs, who was tall and cadaverous-looking with a proper upper class way about him, rushed off into the night gleefully clutching the screenplay. He was so full of energy and happy to help Terry out. Terry, meanwhile, sent a copy of Burroughs’ classic novel Naked Lunch to Jane Fonda, who detested it and wanted no part of Burroughs. Terry was mortified. How could he go to his friend and tell him that he was turned down for the job because an aspiring Hollywood starlet disliked his book? Biting the bullet, Terry made a date for us to have dinner with Burroughs at his favorite Indian restaurant. Terry fretted all the way there and his trepidation proved correct as Burroughs showed up with lots of rewrites. He had already done a lot of work on the script. It never occurred to Terry that such a great and influential writer as Burroughs would be turned down on a project, especially a rewrite of a screenplay. It was awful and Terry was simply heartbroken for his friend. To his credit, Bill took the news calmly and told Terry he appreciated the gesture. With the bad news out of the way, we enjoyed the rest of the meal but the conversation veered into strange waters as Terry and Bill talked about many things that night. He asked Burroughs what had drawn him to Scientology. Bill explained that it was the e-meter that fascinated him. But his interest waned and he told us that when he tried to quit he received threats and harassment by the “Org.” Terry listened and nodded gravely. The discussion then turned to Burroughs’ time in Mexico; he ranted about the Mexican people, who he felt to be truly corrupt and disrespectful to human life. On one of our last nights in London before journeying back to the States, Terry and I ran into Bill Claxton and Peggy Moffitt, who were in town briefly before heading to Paris for a photo shoot. It was a beautiful spring night and we asked them to accompany us to a party thrown by art dealer Christopher Gibbs, who was friends with The Rolling Stones and Robert Fraser. While waiting outside the Hilton Hotel for a cab, Terry had to pee. He dashed around the corner from the main entrance and came back with two drag queens in full regalia complete with big teased hair, net mini-dresses, and small beaded purses dangling from their wrists. Terry loved outrageousness so it was no surprise he befriended them so quickly. He introduced his new acquaintances to us and asked if they could join us. Who could refuse? We all piled into a cab and headed off to this fashionable soiree. While Terry and Bill mingled, Peggy and I shared a small sofa most of the night with one of the drag queens. It was a funny sight with me sitting between this one guy wearing a dazzling woman’s outfit and Peggy, who was fashionably dressed in a man’s pinstripe suit. At one point, Peggy got up to go the ladies room and noticed her purse

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felt much lighter. She checked and found that her passport was missing. She and Bill had a morning flight to France so it was crucial she find it. The police were summoned and were totally confused by all the cross-dressing. As Peggy was trying to make a report to the London bobbies, the two drag queens insisted on having full body searches. The bobbies finally just gave up with all the nonsense and fled into the night. Bill came back early the next morning and found Peggy’s passport stuck in a tree branch outside the bathroom window. She had no idea how it got out there. We bid adieu to London and Terry was soon back writing at his MGM cubicle. His new assignment was the Tony Curtis comedy Don’t Make Waves, which was the chosen vehicle to introduce producer Martin Ransohoff’s newest discovery Sharon Tate (who at the time was being romanced by the young director Roman Polanski) to the masses. The movie was based on the novel Muscle Beach by Ira Wallach. The elegant John Calley was co-producer, and the gifted Alexander MacKendrick, who had directed the wonderful Sweet Smell of Success with Burt Lancaster and Curtis, was director. Talented people all. The producers were unsatisfied with the screenplay by George Kirgo and Maurice Richlin so once again they turned to Terry. Since this was supposed to be a satire on Southern California living, he was the obvious choice to polish the script and inject wittier dialogue. Don’t Make Waves was a sort of beach-party movie geared for adults, poking fun at surfers, muscle men, groupies, cliffside houses, skydiving, publicity stunts, trampolines, astrology, etc. Curtis starred as a newly arrived Malibu denizen who, after losing his life’s possessions in a car mishap due to self-centered kept woman Claudia Cardinale, blackmails his way into a pool salesman job with Cardinale’s married lover, Robert Webber. Curtis then flips for buxom surfer–sky diver Sharon Tate. Her beau is naïve muscleman Dave Draper, who is easily tricked by Curtis into giving up Tate in hopes of winning his bodybuilding contest. All of them plus Webber’s wife Joanna Barnes are trapped in Curtis’ house which tumbles down a Malibu cliff during a mudslide at the movie’s finale. When Terry brought some script pages home one weekend, I sat on the couch beside him and watched intently as he took out his “magic” pencil, crossing out a word here, or changing punctuation there, to improve the dialogue for the actors. His simplest changes often made the script tighter. As with his other movies, Terry was always on the set during filming. One day he was very excited about going to work because they were shooting at the exquisite cliffside home of Elliott Lewis, high up on the bluffs in Malibu. The scene was the big parachute jump of Tony Curtis and Sharon Tate, whose characters are supposed to land in the home’s swimming pool populated by topless bathing beauties including Playboy Playmate China Lee

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and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! co-star Haji. To generate publicity for the movie, the producers invited a number of journalists to cover the shoot as well as appear in the movie. On the second day of filming, Terry came home totally dejected. He told me that the sky diver who was hired to jump from the plane and take still photos of the stunt doubles as they did their freefall was killed. A breeze caught his chute, which failed to open and he fell into the sea. The camera equipment he was carrying was heavy, and if he had dumped it he may have been saved as rescue boats were dispatched quickly. They dragged the ocean for days looking for his body, with the widow watching on the pier. Terry was shaken by such a wasteful death, especially for such an idiotic movie. Terry brought Alexander MacKendrick home for dinner one night at the Chateau Marmont and the director seemed so subdued and depressed. I thought it was because of the accident but now that I have seen a bit of Don’t Make Waves I know the real reason. It is because the film is truly unwatchable and it finally, finally makes sense to me why Terry did not ask for screen credit. What were all these grownups thinking? What audience were they aiming at? At least with the teenage movies I made in Hollywood, we knew the audience we were aiming for. Was this supposed to be farce? I love farce, but this was not! The creators didn’t seem to know if they wanted the movie to be a true satire or a feeble romantic comedy with a predictable happy ending. If they would have stuck to satire, which they hired Terry for, they may have succeeded. I’ll give credit to Tony Curtis for his amusing attempt at slapstick but poor Sharon Tate was photographed in the most vulgar manner I have ever seen. Her first scene is a point-of-view shot of her bikini-clad derriere as she is dragging the motionless Curtis from the ocean after conking him on the head with her surfboard. Talk about exploitation! The less said about Claudia Cardinale’s screeching, the better. This was Terry’s first movie to get some scathing reviews and (coupled with the dossier being secretly kept on him by the FBI) was the start of his downfall in the movie industry.

4. Eastward Ho! Terry rented a house in Malibu, just outside the famous gated Malibu Colony, on a short dead end street along the beach. The real estate agent took care of everything for us. The house was owned by a famous actor whose name escapes me. We had just moved in from the Chateau Marmont and I was sitting on the floor unpacking when Terry walked by. I asked him how I was doing and he said, “Fine, but we’re going to Rome,” and off we went. It was only for a weekend, but it was like a dream come true being in the Eternal City. We were put up at the grandest hotel in Rome. Terry had to go to the studio for meetings regarding Barbarella so I was free to explore. Wandering the streets alone in an unknown city is my favorite pastime. I remember the Spanish Steps, and I went to the Coliseum and just stood there, letting my imagination run wild. Centuries passed before my eyes, and I felt that this wasn’t the first time I had seen it, probably because it is so familiar from pictures. I walked back to the hotel and ordered lunch in my room. I was unable to read the menu so I just pointed to something, anything, and what came was the most delicious pasta salad I had ever eaten, with mint and other tasty morsels mixed in. I never accompanied Terry to the studio but knew he had met with Dino de Laurentiis, Roger Vadim, and Jane Fonda regarding his screenplay. He never once mentioned to me about collaborating with any other writer during this pre-production stage. But he did mention that Vadim and Jane were particularly excited to have cast John Phillip Law in the role of the blind angel named Pygar. An extremely tall, handsome man with blondish hair and piercing blue eyes, he had made an impact as a Russian sailor in his first big movie The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966). Jane worked with him in Otto Preminger’s turgid Southern drama Hurry Sundown (1966) and she and Vadim felt he was “a real find.” One evening Jane and Vadim took us to a fine restaurant frequented by all the celebrities while in Rome. It was down a short flight of stairs, and heavily carpeted in red. Jane and Vadim were in front of me with Terry nearby. I was bringing up the rear, and when the flashbulbs started popping I was blinded and tumbled down the stairs on my rear end. I got up quickly; fortunately no one had seen me slip because all eyes were on Jane and Vadim. 63

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I bet my fall was captured on film by some paparazzo who probably wondered, “Who the hell is that clumsy blonde?” While dining we chatted briefly about my “acting career,” and I mentioned that my stage name was Gail Gilmore. Vadim had trouble pronouncing it with his heavy French accent. I realized at that point if a great director like Vadim could not utter it, maybe it was time for another name change. Voila, I became Gail Gibson. I was reading in the paper shortly afterwards about the latest fashions and about the Gibson Girl. I thought, “Maybe Vadim can say Gibson.” By this point I really wasn’t into my career. As Terry used to say a lot, “You can call me anything you like—just don’t call me late for lunch.” The following afternoon Jane and Vadim took us (with a car and private driver) to eat at a restaurant way out of town by the sea. We ate delicious Fritto Misto di Mare (fried mixed seafood) and had a lovely relaxing time with them. The next day Terry and I flew back to LA. Atypically, Terry was not present on the set the entire time when they began filming the movie shortly afterwards. Returning to the beach house, I borrowed Tina Aumont’s cleaning lady (the one Tina’s husband Christian had made a blitzkrieg sexual attack on, frightening the poor thing out of her wits). I introduced her to the real estate agent, saying that it would be handy for her clients if the maid came along with the rental. Many years later I got a thank-you note from the maid, saying that she had put all her children through college because of me. It also helped the agent, and in gratitude she showed me the only piece of property left on the beach side of the road. It was for sale for $60,000, but Terry wasn’t interested in buying it. Actually, despite being remembered as a star of three beach movies, I don’t like sand much, and the surf is constantly pounding. The sea I grew up with in Canada was sometimes calm and clear as glass. I bet that lot is now worth millions of dollars! While at the beach house, I was guest starring on some TV show. I came home one day after a long day at the studio and my neighbor, Ellie Walker, who lived down the beach, came by and asked me if I had looked in the mailbox. Apparently Terry had asked her to check up on me. I said I hadn’t and she gently suggested I do so immediately. I retrieved my mail and there was a note from Terry saying that he was going back to New York for Christmas to see if he could patch things up in his marriage—a veritable “Dear John” letter. I was surprised and broke down in tears. He never discussed this with me and this came out of the blue. After thinking about it some more and regaining my composure, I figured it might be a good idea for him to do the “right thing” for a change since he did have a child. To get my mind off of Terry, I went to Ellie’s place down the beach and had a lovely evening with her and Bobby.

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When commenting on married life, Terry would say, “Home is where you hang yourself,” a play on words from the song, “Anywhere You Hang Your Hat Is Home.” I asked why he had married a second time if he felt that way, and he replied, “At a certain time in a man’s life there is an urge to settle down and one looks for the most compatible person around.” Terry was not sentimental, and that was a better explanation than the one he gave me for his marriage of convenience-only to his first wife. Terry decided that a perfect place to write might be a cargo ship. He chose a boat that had capacity for only twelve passengers, who would sit at the captain’s table at dinner and be enthralled by interesting conversation— or so he thought. Per Terry, the captain was “a drunkard and a boor,” and the other passengers were “dullsville and full of clichés.” To make matters worse, Terry and his traveling companion (a sophisticated-looking brunette) had to stay in separate cabins because they weren’t married, this being the staid 1950s. They were stuck, so they got off at an island where it was rumored that Homer was born. Discovering too late that there would not be another boat for a week, the pair was stranded. The concerned villagers asked around who was out to sea and one hospitable fisherman’s wife offered them a spare bedroom. They stayed for a week and took the next boat out. Terry solved the separate cabin problem by marrying the girl. But the poor gullible bride seemed to take this as some kind of commitment, and was quite disappointed when, back on dry land, he did not take their marriage vows seriously though he did keep up the sham of a marriage while back in New York. The marriage lasted a little over a year. But back then in Terry’s Paris–Greenwich Village days, the way these guys cavalierly dumped their girlfriends was to have her deliver a small bag of pot to a friend as a sign that the friend had permission to hit on her. The unsuspecting lass would usually fall for the manipulated seduction and move on to the next lover. It seems kind of cold-hearted but as Terry would say, “La femme son faible,” which means, “Women are weak.” These guys seem to have left a lot of broken hearts behind them with their hipster, unsentimental attitude (or as Terry described it, “iron in the soul”). Terry was on my mind while he was trying yet again to reconcile with his wife but I was distracted because “Groovy Bob” Fraser had flown in from London and came to stay with me for a few days. I put him up in the modest spare bedroom. As I was passing by his room one afternoon, I happened to catch a glimpse of him in his underwear. He got so embarrassed and turned crimson red. That surprised me since he was gay and we knew each other quite well. But Robert was very English and proper. I didn’t know if Terry would return and I was taken aback when he showed up on my doorstep a few days later. I asked him how it went and he

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complained that there was very little snow. I didn’t pry any further. I knew this had to be a difficult decision for him and I was glad to see him. I never asked Terry if he was going to divorce his wife and I never pressured him to. We had a Bohemian type of relationship. He was always free to return to her. It was his choice not to. Terry was still extremely suspicious of any man who showed the slightest interest in me. Though it was the Swinging Sixties, we didn’t have a swinging sex life. He even hated when I smoked pot, thinking I would become vulnerable to some guy’s advances. “Guys will fuck mud and that’s the only reason they would even talk to a woman, to seduce her,” Terry would say to me. I got used to his overly watchful eye and it was sort of comforting knowing how protective he was of me. But for the most part our relationship was like today’s gays in the military with a “Don’t Ask–Don’t Tell” policy towards any of our “extracurricular activities.” The only times I had relations with other men usually happened when I was away from Terry visiting family or friends in Canada. I know Terry too had his dalliances but never knew when or with whom. We both liked it that way and respected each other’s privacy. Our stay in Malibu was short as we soon departed the beach house and California for good. Terry decided we should live in New York City since he had quit working at MGM and no other movie offers were coming in. This was a disappointment to him and a mystery to me considering that he was an extremely talented screenwriter. I once again packed up all of my belongings and this time headed east. I am an “out of sight, out of mind” type of person so I deserted my friends Ellie Walker, Tina Aumont, and Peggy Moffitt and my agent Sam Armstrong with nary a goodbye. Terry and I just upped and left. I even abandoned my nifty yellow convertible sports car that I parked in the basement of the Chateau Marmont not knowing if I would be back again. I never knew what became of my car. When we arrived in New York, we first stayed at a small hotel on East 74th Street. That very night we went to a party given by Terry’s best friend Larry Rivers, who was a famous pop artist and saxophone player, at his loft on East 14th Street. The joint was jumping. In the corner of the living room was Larry’s three-year-old daughter Gwynne dancing in her playpen to the blaring jazz music and observing the self-absorbed grownups with a wry grin on her face. I was mingling on the other side of the apartment when I heard raised voices near the front door. As they got more intense, the party screeched to a halt. By the time I weaved my way through the crowded apartment, I found a sullen Terry. He said that his wife, who had arrived with his friend Arnold Weinstein, became upset over our presence and left. The party continued and Terry, embarrassed, behaved as if nothing had happened. I learned

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from Terry that forever after, his wife snidely referred to me as “Miss Beach Ball.” A few days later, Terry had to go to London for a week and told me to look for an apartment. He suggested I buy The Village Voice and explained that after World War II, housing was so tight that they would read the obituaries and if anyone had died they would rush over to try to rent the apartment. I thought that was a bit ghoulish and just stuck to the classified section. He instructed me to call Si Litvinoff, his friend and business manager, if I found a place. I did and left Si a message with his answering service but he never returned my call. Luckily I happened upon another apartment—a modest one-bedroom on the parlor floor of a townhouse on a lovely street in Greenwich Village. When Terry returned, we immediately moved in. As I was unpacking (it seems I was always unpacking), I looked out the window and noticed a familiar face. It was Arnold Weinstein waving and smiling at me from his apartment directly across the street. Only in New York. During the 1950s, Terry used to spend time in the Hamptons out on the southeastern shore of Long Island. At that time, New York City’s literary set were its biggest celebrities as movie and rock stars had not yet discovered its pleasures. When Terry took me to the Hamptons for the first time that summer, I said that the situation was incestuous. He got mad and asked, “What to you mean by that?” I replied, “The same ‘quality lit set’ who behave badly in New York does the same in the Hamptons.” This only made him angrier. I couldn’t understand his ire because some of this crowd dropped him. My response was, “Good riddance!” They let their hatred and envy get the best of them. At the time I only felt contempt for all of them. I said to Terry, “They are disgusting—Bourgeoisie beyond belief.” Terry felt badly about losing some of his friends but what could he do? They all made their choice but some like Larry Rivers and Arnold Weinstein stayed loyal to him. Terry had lots of other friends and one whom I immediately loved was Earl McGrath. He is tall, dark, and handsome and is double-entendre all the time and always had me in stitches. A dealer in modern art when I met him, he went on to become an executive at Atlantic Records and later president of Rolling Stones Records until 1980. Earl’s wonderful wife Camilla was a countess and a descendant of Pope Leo XIII. They met in Italy after she mistook him for a dancer as she spied on him from afar while he joined ballet dancer George Zorich in doing his exercises on the balcony of a nearby villa. Camilla was a very talented photographer and asked to take pictures of me. I needed new photos for my acting portfolio as I now had grown my hair long and straight but only had publicity shots of me with an out-of-date big blonde bouffant, so I readily agreed. As we were shooting with me wearing a patterned mini-dress, Camilla asked, “How come you can move so gracefully?”

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I told her because I was a ballet dancer. The pictures came out great and I used them to show casting directors but by this time I had pretty much lost interest in my so-called acting career. A couple of weeks after we had settled into our new home, Terry wanted to introduce me to his son Nile and asked me what I thought would be the best way to do this. I certainly had no concept of family life, so I had no preconceived notion of what was expected of me. That was fine with Terry since he wanted a companion, not a mommy. Even so, I suggested we meet at the children’s playground in Washington Square Park. According to Terry, Nile was a passive little boy and went to a child psychologist named Mrs. First who came up with the same plan. It seems a lot of children were in therapy, which was the fashion at the time. I went to the park and found Terry and his son, who was on the swings. Nile was a quiet, cute boy with straight sandy-brown hair. Terry introduced us and I said hello. I thought he was sweet but as with most six-year-olds he was more interested in playing than chatting with me. Terry had little or no interest in children and thought the arrogance of thinking one’s genes were so important that they must be passed on was bizarre. He found the American child being the center of the home appalling. The mother is treated like an old shoe, and the parents are afraid of their kids. They try to become friends to their children so the kids become monsters or completely passive. Terry tried to be a good father and devote as much time as possible to his son, but with creative types the work always comes before the family. It must. That is why most artists have such chaotic personal lives. Ordinary people put family first while artists put their work first. That summer, Terry got a tip from a friend about a bigger place for rent on East 36th Street. Wanting more space and able to My “groovy chick” look, ca. 1966. Photograph by Camilla afford the higher rent, I was back to McGrath, courtesy Earl McGrath.

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packing up our belongings and on the move again to a quaint three-story carriage house. It was situated in the back of an apartment building so you had to go through the hallway and out the back door to get to our front door. The first floor had a dining room, kitchen, and cozy, over-size living room with a fireplace. A spiral staircase led up to the second floor which contained two bedrooms and a bathroom. The top floor had another bedroom, empty but for a bed, with a balcony and its own private bath. One late afternoon soon after we had settled into our new home, a strange though brutally handsome man came to the door and asked for Terry. When I said he was not home, he just barged in saying “I’ll wait” and plopped down on our couch. Nervous, I fled to the bedroom upstairs and locked the door. He just sat there quietly while dusk fell. Eventually Terry showed up and was elated to see his old friend from Paris. The guy was Boris Grurevich, a Bulgarian-American who hung around the cafes back then. He was a soldier of fortune who was the only non–Cuban to participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He lived to tell the tale and Terry interviewed him for an Esquire magazine story amusingly entitled “Recruiting for the Big Parade— How I Signed Up at $250 a Day for the Big Parade Through Havana, Bla Bla Bla, and Wound Up Working for the CIA—A Hipster Mercenary’s Account of the Bay of Pigs Invasion.” Feeling safer with Terry home, I crept down the stairs and went into hostess mode, cavalierly pouring drinks. Boris had some cocaine. I had tried it before and it seemed like something the dentist gave you with its numbing effects, but not this time. I left them alone in the living room to talk, and went back to the bedroom where the full golden glory of the drug hit me in waves. It was a magnificent high. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, that never happened again. The few times I did cocaine after this never came close to the sensation I got from Boris’ stash. Terry would do cocaine and pop pills only if offered. He tried heroin once and told me that it “reduced everything to a warm glow.” He thought addicts were the most motivated people on Earth because “from the moment they wake up they are focused on getting their fix. If an addict is working and can get what he needs at a pharmacy, as in England, he can continue with a productive life.” Terry never bought drugs of any kind. Sometimes he would not even partake and just pass the joint or LSD on to others so he could watch their erratic behavior. He’d then go home and write about it. Watching people behave badly would give Terry material for his stories. The carriage house turned out to be a very good move; there was a room for Terry’s son, who would come to stay on weekends. To amuse Nile while Terry was busy writing, I would take him on little trips around the city. One

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time we went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey and another time we visited the planetarium at the Museum of Natural History. While I entertained Nile, Terry was finishing up the screenplay for Barbarella. He enjoyed writing for Jane Fonda. Terry was particularly pleased with the opening scene that he created where she enters the spaceship and floats weightless while removing her spacesuit, which facilitated a kind of striptease as the theme song played over the credits. Jane had studied ballet and to me it was one of the most elegant and sensual stripteases ever seen on the silver screen. Furthermore, it was a valid moment. Terry would never write something frivolous or capricious. Jane disagreed and I think has regretted doing the scene to this day in spite of how beautiful she looked. Barbarella was set in the year 40,000. The title character was a sexy astronaut from Earth sent by its president to the planet SoGo to capture an evil scientist named Durand-Durand (yes, that is where the Eighties pop group got their name). She joins forces with a blind angel named Pygar to battle the planet’s lesbian Black Queen who tries to thwart Barbarella’s mission. Terry had the scantily clad Barbarella escape from one sexual torture device after another as she persevered to save the Earth. Another scene that Terry was proud of was when Barbarella was being pursued by tiny mechanical robotic toys that wanted to bite her in her most vulnerable places. He found this to be most amusing. Overall, Terry loved writing Barbarella because he felt it was his Candy—a brave girl trying to do the right thing but in outer space. She was liberated and was her own woman just trying to get along. Terry also liked working with Vadim and Jane but Dino de Laurentiis (whom Terry nicknamed “Dino D”) caused some minor problems. Terry felt that de Laurentiis was only interested in making a profit and producing movies on the cheap. He had no interest in creating good cinema. It was a surprise to us when Barbarella was released that screenplay credit not only included Vadim but also a number of Italian names unknown to Terry. This is perhaps one of the first instances where everybody and his brother gets on the payroll and receives screen credit for not contributing anything. Though I can’t verify it because I never set foot on the soundstage during filming, I know that Terry wrote such tight scripts that there was no room for change. To the day he died, Terry never mentioned collaborating with anyone regarding Barbarella. When he did work with another writer, he always gave them their due. Decades later, de Laurentiis called Terry about writing a low-budget sequel to Barbarella and mentioned casting Jane Fonda’s niece in the lead since he felt that Jane was now “over the hill.” Terry, who was ill at this time, was not thrilled with this offer and it never came to fruition. However, as of

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2008, they are once again threatening a remake. I hope this too never makes it to the big screen because I think the original truly captured the feel of the comic with Vadim’s pop art interpretation aided by Terry’s satirical script. Also, they will never be able to improve or even replicate Jane’s opening striptease scene. The times were a-changin’ in 1967 and a lot of American history happened while we were living at the carriage house. The Vietnam War was brought into our living room in full color on the six o’clock news. I saw President Johnson announce on TV, with tears in his eyes, that he would not run for a second term. Meanwhile, Julia Child was teaching America (and me) how to cook. I would prepare elaborate dinners right along with her. Sometimes Terry would call and tell me to meet him at Elaine’s, the now-famous celebrity restaurant, which then was just a local hangout for writers. Always up for a night on the town, I would shove the gourmet dinner into the freezer and hop into a cab. Elaine Kaufman, the proprietor, would let the writers run a tab, and there was often a card game at a back table. Other times we would go to Casey’s on West 11th Street in the Village, where Freddy Red was the house piano player, and David Amram, who was the youngest conductor ever of the New York Philharmonic, would bring his French horn for a jam session. Terry had known David for over ten years. Recalling their early days as friends, David remarks: Terry was always part of the band, from the time that we met back in early Fifties Paris. Sitting there quietly, you could feel his tremendous powers of listening. You knew he was somebody that was part of the music even before speaking to him. I felt that even before I talked to him, and we instantly became friends. He was young, well-dressed, very quiet, and had a beautiful trace of a Texas accent. I hadn’t even read anything that Terry had written, but just hearing him talk was enough to make me think about things when I was with him. He had a wonderful rapport with musicians, and we would hang out at this place where I used to play called the Des Etage a Vie. Everybody would come by after their gigs to play for free. People would read poetry, make up raps and rhymes, play jazz until dawn. Terry encouraged me to pursue my dream to be a symphonic composer drawing from my experiences of jazz and classical European music, and somehow putting these experiences into symphonic form. He advised me to never give up being an improviser and a player.

Casey’s was a popular restaurant with fine food in Arnold Weinstein’s neighborhood. Sure enough, Arnold and Terry’s wife showed up one night. They paused at our table and through clenched teeth his wife barely got out a “hello.” This was the first time I actually met her. She was an attractive woman with long hair dyed a reddish hue, a Romanesque nose, and slightly crooked teeth. Statuesque, she stood slouched over, which was the norm for

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girls of her generation who weren’t supposed to tower over their men. Discovering that there were no available tables, she and Arnold left. Having been married to a piano player in Montreal, I figured a house is not a home without one, so Terry went right to the source and asked David Amram to go with me to pick out a piano. Terry had a large German Shepard dog named Gray, rumored to be the offspring of the famous Rin Tin Tin, who was left with Nile while we were in LA. Terry insisted that the dog go with us as a chaperone. His jealousy of me when it came to spending time with other men reared its head once again even though David was a good friend of his. But David did have a reputation as a bit of a playboy. Terry’s paranoia really didn’t bother me since I trusted me. David and I tied the dog to a parking meter and went into the store and bought a nifty Yamaha. Terry shared an East 55th Street office with Si Litvanoff, his lawyer (and later film business partner) who was advising him on money matters since he had two households to support and work was drying up. According to Si, Terry was stretched financially because “his wife’s new lifestyle at Henderson Place became a drain.” She had moved to an ornate apartment on the Upper East Side close to Gracie Mansion, the home of New York City’s mayors, which was way beyond what Terry could afford. Terry was well-known and well-respected in Hollywood with Dr. Strangelove and The Cincinnati Kid and in the literary world with the bestselling Candy, which was famously banned in England and the U.S., and The Magic Christian. I could not fathom why no offers were coming in though he continued writing short stories. Terry and I still continued socializing with the hip New York crowd because for Terry this was fodder for his creative process. We would usually be one of the first to arrive at a party or social event but always the last to leave because Terry did not David Amram, ca. 2007. Courtesy David Amram. want to miss any weirdness.

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Sometimes if the happening was a bit staid, Terry would initiate some bad behavior to use later for his stories. Terry and I became fixtures at George Plimpton’s literary get-togethers. Terry met George in Paris during the late Forties when there was a large expatriate community of Americans living there. George and Peter Matthiessen were publishing a small magazine in English while Terry was enrolled at the Sorbonne where he attended lectures by renowned philosopher and dramatist Jean-Paul Sartre. He submitted his short story “The Sun and the Stillborn Stars” to them. George and Peter thought Terry’s tale was “too elegant” for their modest little magazine. They decided to start a new publication and with Harold Humes and a few others they founded the Paris Review. Terry remained friendly with both of them, especially George, whose New York literary parties were a must to attend. Terry had a philosophy that you choose to be “on the scene or not.” Being a writer, he very much wanted to be in the middle of the happening so that is why he was a staple at Plimpton’s parties for most of his life. Even though Terry was painfully shy, he was always the life of Plimpton’s parties. After a drink or two he would loosen up and become extremely sociable. It relaxed and energized him. His alcoholic beverage of choice was whisky, a highball, or a martini depending on the occasion. Terry used to say, “Drinking is an anesthetic from cliché and stupid people.” One reason he decided to live in Paris in his youth was because he couldn’t stand one more cliché, until he learned French and found they had the same problem. I found George Plimpton to be charming but we really didn’t have much to say to each other. His magazine essays about his escapades as a professional athlete in one sport or another were lightweight and not particularly interesting to me. But I did respect him for founding the Paris Review, keeping it afloat for fifty years, and for being able to spot great contemporary literature. Practically every famous writer in America turned up at Plimpton’s at one time or another. One who stands out for me is Norman Mailer, a wonderful writer of both fiction and nonfiction whose books included The Naked and the Dead and Why Are We in Vietnam? Norman was always the smartest guy in the room but not necessarily the most liked. At a dinner party once someone asked, “Who was equally as famous as Shakespeare during his lifetime?” Nobody knew the answer except Norman, who replied, “Cervantes.” At George’s parties, Norman would talk to a group of about three or four women including me (which was about all the women in the room) and get us laughing. He then would say something completely sexist that would have us all groan in contempt. I eventually had enough of his erratic behavior and thereafter would make sure to avoid him at all costs. The one time I couldn’t

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George Plimpton (center) holding court at one of his many literary soirees with Terry on his left and author Marilyn Meeske on his right, ca. 1980s.

escape him was at Elaine’s where he came in blind drunk one night. I was sitting at a table near the door with Terry and songwriter Jerry Leiber who co-composed such classic rock ’n’ roll songs as “Stand by Me,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and “Spanish Harlem.” Norman walked straight to Jerry and without saying a word grabbed him around the neck. Jerry lost his balance and both of them fell to the floor with Norman still not letting up on his grip. Terry quickly jumped up and separated them. After righting the chair, Jerry sat back down and ordered a drink. Norman staggered out into the night without uttering a word. Plimpton’s parties were always the same strange affair. Despite (or maybe because of) his upper class background, he served cheap liquor without any food—not even a pretzel. Terry told me that he used to serve Dinti Moore’s canned beef stew at these gatherings. Terry confided in me that one time he added a special ingredient to the stew—dog food. He sat back and watched playfully to see if Plimpton or anyone else would notice. Nobody did. At each of Plimpton’s soirees, which Terry dubbed “the Quality Lit Set,” you would find a roomful of writers such as John Phillips (the son of John P. Marquand who won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Late George Apley and created the Mr. Moto series, and Christina Sedgwick whose uncle was editor of The Atlantic Monthly), William Styron, and others standing with their backs to the wall, drinks in hand, and glancing suspiciously

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back and forth at each other, obviously wondering what the other guy was writing. When jazz musicians would get together, they would discuss what songs they were playing. Not so with writers who never talked about their current projects. It was more like a room full of cats with their backs against the wall and hair standing on end bristling. They weren’t an especially friendly bunch except for the handful of women scribes who were invited. Terry on the other hand was like a musician and a jokester mingling with the crowd and trying to rile somebody up. Terry wouldn’t have wanted to miss any outrageous behavior. I was resigned to the fact that we had to stay so late even though I found most of these guys to be jerks and rarely spoke to any of them. Terry always looked forward to George’s parties. I took great pains to make sure he got there even after he became ill during the Nineties and we were living in Connecticut, driving two and a half hours each way, and heading back home as dawn was breaking, with Terry snoozing in the back seat. While Terry continued writing and socializing, I found a New York agent. Impressed with my credits, he immediately took me on as a client. I auditioned for an Off-Broadway show called The Cuban Thing directed by Jack Gelber. Terry admired his work, but he forgot, or didn’t know, that his wife and Jack’s wife were friends. I didn’t get the job but the controversial play closed on opening night. Terry thought that I should study with the esteemed Stella Adler. She had trained Marlon Brando and many other sexy young actors but hated women and would tell them to go home and have babies. I was in her class one day when some poor student was self-consciously trying to do a scene. After he finished, Stella critiqued it, saying that he was not bold enough. She told him to take off his shirt and try again. The shy young man turned pale at this command, and Stella turned to the class and haughtily demanded that everyone take their clothes off. I thought, as the students sunk into their seats, “Oh boy, Terry’s going to kill me when he hears about this.” She was wearing a pale yellow and turquoise double-breasted ice-cream plaid dress with big black buttons. Stella, who was still attractive at sixty-six years old, marched across the front of the room and turned on a dime, ripping her dress open, buttons flying, and revealed a black Merry Widow corset with attached garter belt. It was a sight to behold. She then closed her dress with the one remaining button and walked back across the room dismissing the class. I was relieved! One time I did a scene form Shaw’s Saint Joan and Stella asked me, “Why do you walk so strangely?” I replied that I was a ballet dancer. She then insisted that I never attend ballet class again. My coat was stolen during another class and after trudging home through the slush-filled streets

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clad only in a stylish mini-dress and high-heel shoes, I quit and never went back. I flew down to Houston to audition for a role in a play opposite Zero Mostel, but he was a giant bear of a man, and the part went to a buxom blonde glamour girl twice my size. Zero once stalked Stella Adler all the way down Fifth Avenue, hiding behind lampposts and crouching behind trash cans amusing himself until Stella got angry and yelled, “Just stop it, Zero!” My friend Geraldine Page got me into the Actor’s Studio about a year later as a professional observer, which means that you are not a member but are allowed to attend the sessions and can act in a scene if a member asks you. The esteemed Lee Strasberg conducted the sessions. An older actress cast me in a scene with her but Terry was called to London (I think to work on The Magic Christian) so off I went, leaving her in the lurch. I admit it was totally inconsiderate of me but I realized that I didn’t have what it takes to be a good actor. I liked performing but I didn’t have the depth that the actors needed here. They would tell us, for example, to “dig down deep and imagine something from your childhood that your father did that really upset you and bring that emotion to the scene.” I had nothing to relate to as I rarely saw my father and just couldn’t get into this method of acting. Looking back, I probably could have continued with my career in comedy and lightweight fare (my agent Sam Armstrong was still sending me telegrams hoping I’d return to Hollywood because he was still getting auditions for me) but I decided to concentrate on dancing again. During the Summer of Love, while the hippies took over Golden Gate Park in the Haight-Asbury section of San Francisco, the “Hippest Guy on the Planet” as he was nicknamed became co-owner of a 30-foot cabin cruiser with Rip Torn. Terry and Rip became reacquainted when we moved back to New York City. Rip and his wife Geraldine Page had three children (Angelica and twin boys Tony and John) and were invited to stay at someone’s splashy house in the Hamptons. When Rip mentioned that he was bringing his kids, he was told there was no room for them. He suggested that they would bring their sleeping bags and pitch a tent on the back lawn but the owner didn’t want him to ruin the grass. Rip, getting angry, quipped, “What am I suppose to do with them? Put them in a kennel?!” With nowhere to go, Gerry suggested that Rip take “that nice writer Terry” up on his offer to join us at the Connecticut farmhouse, which Terry had bought with his wife in 1960. Rip did and we all had a wonderful time solidifying a friendship that would last decades. Terry and Rip purchased a 30-foot wooden cabin cruiser—one of a few built by a famous boat builder. People would shout out, “Is that a Jorgenson?” I quickly learned that Jorgenson was the topmost echelon of boat

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builders. It slept two and had an indoor motor enclosed in a neat wooden cabinet the size of a small dining room table. The boat was in dry dock and placed high up on stilts. The only way we could get into it was by climbing up a rickety old ladder. When I first saw the boat, it just looked like an old tub to me, but when I came back from the first gourmet deli in Amagansett carrying Beef Wellington, there was Terry and a famous publisher named Cass Canfield, high and dry, toasting the setting sun with some thirty-yearold Scotch. It was sight to behold. Terry and I would drive out weekends, leaving the steamy city behind us to work on the boat in preparation for the big day of the launch. My job was to scrape every bit of the old paint off, inside and out, with a tiny scraper. This took some time and was exhausting work in the blazing sun. Once the boat was finally seaworthy, Terry christened it the “Bay O Peeg” and flew a small “Jolly Roger” flag from the bow. It was moored in Three-Mile Harbor. We spent many a night on it in sleeping bags placed on the two banquettes with a kerosene lantern for light. The sound of the small waves splashing against the hull would gently rock me into a deep and restful sleep. Terry on the other hand was battling his own demons and the lack of writing prospects. Fretting, he would drink himself to sleep. Occasionally his son Nile would join us and sleep on the outside cabinet in a cozy sleeping bag. When we weren’t on the boat, which I’m happy to say only left the dock once, we spent a lot of time at Larry Rivers’ modest house in Southampton, where many interesting people stopped by, and we would often stay the night. We’d hang out in his backyard and I don’t remember anyone ever trekking to the beach. One hot Sunday night in July 1967, I was at the wheel of Larry’s Cadillac with him, Terry, and another guy who I can’t remember in the back seat partying noisily as we were heading back to the city. They were making such a racket that I couldn’t concentrate on the road and turned on the radio to drown them out. The news came on and the announcer said that seventeen cities were burning from riots all over the country. So much for the Summer of Love. The boat was in its designated slip, and one day after coming back from an errand I found Terry sitting cross-legged on the bow with two lines of rope, one in each hand, intently studying a book opened to a chapter on knot tying. I peeked at the title and it was called Navigation Made Easy. This did not give me much confidence regarding our maiden voyage. We didn’t go beyond the breakwater. Getting back into the slip after our short test run was hair-raising and I was just glad to stay firmly tied to the dock. During this time we learned that our friend Robert Fraser was convicted of heroin possession and was sentenced to six months in prison. A few

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months prior he was arrested along with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger for drug possession when the police raided Richards’ home the morning after a party. A picture of Bob and Mick shackled together with their hands up, sitting in the back of a police car, was splashed across newspapers all over the world. Terry, like everybody else at the time, knew the police were just targeting the Stones and that this was pure harassment. Groovy Bob was the one guest who actually had any drugs on him but Jagger was charged with “possession of amphetamines,” which were prescribed by his doctor, and Keith charged with “allowing his home to be used for consumption of cannabis and possession of heroin.” The Stones were found guilty but after there was a public uproar as reported by the press, the boys were acquitted on appeal. The sentence against Bob was upheld as the new judge did not take it lightly that a man of Bob’s upbringing had been caught with over 40 pills of heroin on his person, and he was carted off to Wormwood Scrubs. Terry felt badly for his friend who had a drug addiction and wrote him a letter in prison to try to cheer him up. The letter began: My dear Bob: Wormwood Scrubs! Indeed! This is all really quite too shocking, Bob! (Surely Lattir or Spanish Tone could have done this stint on you behalf!) In my view, sir, you have gone too far this time in your search for the odd and picaresque!

In another part of the letter Terry jokingly informs Bob that he tried to phone him: We got through all right, but then there was a ruddy balls-up: “Whot? New York calleding?? ... Frayser? Robert Frayser? Well, ay meahn to saiy, ’ee’s a prisoner ’ere, ya know!” “Yes, well, we just wanted to, uh, you know, talk to him.” “Whot, talk to Frayser? Whot’s it all about then?!” “Well, we just wanted to, uh, you know, say hello.” “Whot, saiy ’ello to Frayser?? Oh ’ee’s not got the privileges for that ay’m afrayed!” “Pardon?” “Whot? [pause impatiently] Well, ay meahn to saiy, ’ee is a prisoner ’ere— and ’ee’s not got the privilege!” Well, anyway, you can bet we gave this chap (I think it was the warden) short-shrift for his impertenance. But to no avail.

While poor Robert whiled away the summer in prison, we rented a cottage for the month of August in the sand dunes of Amagansett with Rip and Geraldine Page. She was working in a Broadway play (I think it was Black Comedy/White Lies) and they would drive out on Saturday night after the show and stay until Tuesday afternoon. Gerry’s twin boys were toddlers at the time and she was already teaching them numbers by drawing them with a stick in

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the sand. I asked her how she could be so focused on them and she explained that it was because she was able to get away to do her plays. Nile and his black lab Bowser came to stay at the cottage with us. There was a dartboard hanging in a breezeway in the garden and writer Bruce Jay Friedman’s children would come over to play darts with him. Bruce, a wellrespected novelist (Stern, A Mother’s Kisses) and later screenwriter (The Heartbreak Kid, Stir Crazy, Splash), lived down a sandy path a few dunes away and the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with Terry on the cover was blasting from every house as we would make our way to his home. The Hamptons was mostly made up of large potato fields with old farmhouses in the middle. The population consisted of the “Old Money” in their big white houses and a growing group of artists, such as Jackson Pollack and Larry Rivers, escaping from the city for the summer, in more modest housing. Si Litvanoff and his tiny wife, named Toy Story, believe it or not, were buying the homes of the locals, doing small renovations and then reselling them at a profit. Clever guy that Litvanoff, as he possibly was the area’s first “flipper.” We spent most of our time in the Hamptons going to one party after another. At that time there was a small colony of New York celebrity-types out there and we would get invited to practically all the galas thrown by the Hamptons’ “old guard” who were ensconced in beautiful gated estates. One party in particular stands out for me though I don’t recall who our hosts were. Albie Baker, a very elegant gentleman and an international jewel thief, was one of the guests. Purportedly, the Cary Grant character in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie To Catch a Thief was loosely based on Albie. His modus operandi was to walk in the front door of an abode and if anyone happened to be home he would apologize and say, “Oh, I’m sorry I think I got the wrong house” and leave. He also befriended and joined the inner circles of the elite while ripping them off behind their backs. Terry knew Albie, I think from his Greenwich Village days during the Fifties. While Terry was mingling with the crowd, I was standing around nursing my glass of white wine when I noticed Albie rushing over to me. Sputtering in a rage, he exclaimed, “Listen, Gail, you have to do something to shut Terry up. He’s telling everybody that I am a jewel thief and revealing to them my trade secrets.” I walked over to Terry, took him aside, and told him that Albie was really angry about what he was saying about him. Terry was surprised because Albie never kept his profession a mystery and dubbed himself “the world’s greatest jewel thief.” But Terry agreed to stop and soon after all three of us left the party. Years later Terry and I went to dinner at Elaine’s in New York with Albie

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and his adoring German wife. I distinctly remember that she was wearing the most dazzling pendulous emerald earrings surrounded by glittering diamonds. I hadn’t seen jewels that big since the time I was in the casino in Monte Carlo. I was mesmerized by them. At the end of Albie’s life in the late Eighties, he came to New York with his wife for a short stay. He was very ill and wanted Terry to help him write his memoir. Terry had just come out of Sloan-Kettering where he had a cancer operation, so neither was in shape to put much energy into the project. I remember discussing with Albie’s wife about how the men we loved seemed to have suddenly grown old. Knowing we were heading back to the farm in Connecticut, Albie gave Terry his “tools of the trade”—fake license plates, crow bar, and a hacksaw—to keep safe for him. I guess the old guy thought he still had another jewel caper in him. The book never came to pass as Albie died shortly thereafter. His tools became part of the décor of our downstairs den. When the summer came to an end, the harbor master put the “Bay O Peeg” in dry dock for us. Back in the city full-time, we encountered Vietnam War demonstrations, which were rampant. Terry, along with many other well-known authors, signed a petition called “Writers Against the Vietnam War,” which probably did not help his standing with the FBI. One evening I got a phone call from him and he said, “Guess what? I’m in a prison cell with Dr. Spock.” I was not impressed. He was arrested at a demonstration. In the meantime, radical Abbie Hoffman was planning to levitate the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. After Terry’s Dr. Spock incident, Abbie told Terry he was planning on getting incarcerated. “Don’t do it,” was Terry’s advice. “Why not?” asked Abbie. Terry said, “Because that’s what they want.” He explained that the Media loved to show on the six o’clock news famous people being carted away in handcuffs and it doesn’t help the cause. During this time, Terry wrote a short story called “Blood of a Wig” for the anthology Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes that was soon to be published. It was based on an experience he had substituting for an editor at Esquire for two months in the summer of 1962. Terry was interested in reading the unsolicited manuscripts, which the men called “the shit pile” and the women called “the slush pile.” He hoped to discover “a Grandma Moses–type primitive writer” but never did. He got so good at eliminating stories that he could do it on the first paragraph, then the title, and eventually by the writer’s name—or so he said. Terry explained to me his morning routine as this was the first time in his life that he had a 9-to-5 job. “Alarm rings. Get up. Down Dex. Catch bus.” One of the stories in the anthology was called “Terry Southern Interviews a Faggot Male Nurse,” which was originally published in the magazine

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The Realist. It brought Terry a lot of criticism and he was labeled homophobic. He took it in stride and felt gays didn’t take his articles that way but some straights did because they did not get his satirical bent. His goal was to show the world derisive terms such as “faggot” were only words. Terry had a lot of gay and bisexual friends and their sexuality was fully accepted by him. In a 1966 interview with Paul Krassner, the editor of The Realist, Terry defended himself in typical Terry fashion and remarked, “My notion of homosexuality, by the way—I mean the area of interest it holds for me—is in the manner, speech, and implicit outlook, and has nothing to do with the person’s sex life.” He went on to explain that there were openly gay men who acted a certain way. He did not find this “gay syndrome” as he called it unpleasant at all and felt that gay men identified themselves as a group and had more in common with each other than people did who are Catholic, Jewish or African-American. Terry proved once again that he was ahead of his time when he remarked, “I’ll just bet that if someone, a smart politician, really used his head—no pun intended there, Paul, har, har—and made a strong, very direct bid for the huge gay vote—well!” One of the best-reviewed short stories from that anthology was Terry’s autobiographical “Red-Dirt Marijuana” about a twelve-year-old Texas farm boy and the African-American hired hand from his family’s farm who pick some “gage” and plot to smoke it. It was a well-written, leisurely tale and Terry’s expert writing instantly transported the reader to laconic Texas in the Fifties. Terry would eventually expand upon the story and turn it into a novel called Texas Summer, which wasn’t published until 1991. Terry always used to say, “The best words ever written were ‘Once upon a time....’” He just loved mixing fact and fiction in his stories and novels. That is why he was such an observer of human behavior and loved outrageous people. Also that fall, Terry was invited by Si Litvinoff (who had gone into producing) to judge at a beauty contest. But in typical Terry fashion, the contestants were not nubile young girls vying to become Miss USA but drag queens competing to win the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant. This event was organized by Jack Doroshow (whose drag name was Sabrina), the owner of the Nationals Academy. Through his company he had been organizing these beauty pageants nationwide. Contestants would vie for their local titles and the winners would compete for the national crown. To get around local ordinances that forbid cross-dressing, Doroshow would offer a charitable donation and the towns would pass a variance to allow the contest to go on. For the New York pageant, Doroshow lined up the Muscular Dystrophy Association as the charity du jour and they in turn brought in Lady Bird Johnson and Sammy Davis, Jr., as co-sponsors. The star-studded panel of

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judges was purportedly to include Judy Garland and George Raft. To document the pageant, Si hired filmmaker Frank Simon to make a movie of the event with financial backing from Lewis M. Allen. After this was announced, most of the celebrities dropped out, probably fearful that participating on celluloid would tarnish their reputations. The fact that Terry would be on camera with these mostly gay men performing in drag never bothered him in the least. We both came from worlds where people who were different were always accepted. Many in the Hollywood establishment were mortified to be associated with an event like this but Terry just loved outrageous behavior and was in heaven. Terry remained on the panel and, according to Si, suggested his fellow judges including his friend Larry Rivers, George Plimpton, Jerry Leiber, and Andy Warhol. Frank Simon with his crew followed the entrants around for a week with a 16mm hand-held camera. Terry was more involved with the filming of The Queen than I realized as per Si Litvinoff: Terry was present during the entire festival and filming. I had asked him to interview the contestants since he was so great at that. Terry invited Larry and Bernard Giquel from Paris Match to join him. Almost all of the statements made by the men involved in the contest are direct responses to questions put to them by either of the three. Lew Allen’s wife Jay Presson Allen also conducted some interviews. Terry was a wonderful interviewer and as I expected his questions were the best and elicited the most includable responses. But it was our decision later on that the film worked better without the questioner on camera.

Everyone involved was trying to deduce who the winner would be so they would have plenty of footage. Terry and Larry, who took their judging duties seriously, joined in the guessing game and figured it might be a young man from Philadelphia named Richard Finnochio who went under the professional name of Miss Harlow. He was a sweet-looking young boy of nineteen with exquisite fine features, a mop of blonde hair, and a slim physique. Not very tall, he carried himself with grace and spoke in a shy, quiet voice. Because of his appearance (he resembled Joey Heatherton in her Sixties prime), he was forever being mistaken for a woman even in his street clothes and would be addressed as “Miss” in a shop. He would politely correct the person and say it is “Mister.” I attended one of the rehearsals and remember that the other contestants seemed to be down-to-earth guys who, when transformed to women, were all real beauties who knew how to dress and act. They never displayed any shocking or over-the-top behavior, which is what we associate today with drag queens. They handled themselves in an elegant, worldly, and sophisticated manner. It was a real toss-up who would win. Terry and Larry

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were running around gleefully like school boys but both hoped that Harlow would triumph. Larry in particular was taken with him and according to Terry tried to steal a kiss from the naïve boy in an elevator. Larry’s brazenness surprised Terry more than I think it did Harlow. Terry decided to show Harlow the town and take him to a party at George Plimpton’s apartment. Harlow came in his street attire and wanted to be introduced as Richard. I just knew that Terry was up to his mischievous tricks since Richard was forever being mistaken for a woman and he would shake up Plimpton’s party. But first we stopped at a new discothèque underneath the 59th Street Bridge. After making our way to a table, we were soon surrounded by totally confused men acting like fools drooling and bumping into each other. I was the only female in this salivating crowd and was also small and blonde like Richard. We could have been twins. But they almost knocked me over to get to him. On leaving the disco, Richard grabbed my hand because of the oppressive mob of very mystified men who trailed us onto the street as we headed to Plimpton’s apartment. Well, to Terry’s delight, Richard shook up that party too. There were always few women at George’s soirees—you could count them on one hand. Maggie Paley, the great Iris Owens, and Marilyn Meeske all had hard-won writing credits and were regulars amongst a roomful of pompous, uptight “Great American Writers.” As Terry hoped, Richard stuck out and was swarmed by Plimpton and his cronies who were just as completely bemused by Richard’s appearance as the guys in the dance club. Thankfully, we got him out of there in one piece and back to his hotel so he could get his beauty sleep for his big day. The pageant was held at Town Hall. I was in attendance and was awed by how glamourous the guys looked with their heavy makeup and big bouffant hairdos. Some of them were simply stunning. Harlow was not the most beautiful contestant and his blue gown looked straight out of the local Renaissance Fair but he had the most natural womanly look of the group. In his drag persona, he reminded me of Sharon Tate. It wasn’t a surprise that he was chosen one of the five finalists along with Miss Sonia from Boston who resembled Dusty Springfield; Miss Crystal from Manhattan; Miss Emery from New Jersey; and Miss Alphonso from Chicago. Each one then paraded before the judges one last time before the final votes were tabulated. Immediately there was drama when, after being named the third runner-up, the indignant Miss Crystal strutted off the stage in a huff to the surprise of Miss Sabrina the MC who shouted, “Get back here! This is not the time to show temperament.” As hoped, Harlow was crowned the winner to the applause and cheers of the crowd. Once the pageant came to a finish, everybody went to an elegant apart-

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ment for the “after party.” The contestants were still dressed to the nines in their beautiful frocks. I was practically the only woman in attendance and felt like a ragamuffin compared to these glamour girls. Word quickly circulated of how Miss Crystal confronted Harlow backstage, mocking his appearance and accusing the pageant officials of fixing the contest so he would win. At one point Terry was sitting on a sofa with the first runner-up, Miss Emery, a tall, beautiful African-American wearing a dazzling white strapless evening gown. Miss Emery stood up, sauntered over to a marble fireplace, turned and smiled flirtatiously at Terry, who came apart and tried to smile back. But the best he could muster was a nervous Charlie Brown–like crooked grin. To our delight, Frank Simon completed his documentary. The Queen snuck into theaters in 1968 and 1969 after it was invited to screen at the Cannes Film Festival where it was a huge hit. Europeans were much more open to it than staid Americans though I was told it broke box office records at the Kips Bay Theater in Manhattan. Not surprisingly, it failed to get a wide distribution in the rest of the country despite Si Litvinoff’s best efforts as he describes below: I hired Lee Solters, a top press agent for the likes of David Merrick, Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra, to start the buzz and also used Mary Ellen Mark and Jill Krementz (later Mrs. Kurt Vonnegut) to do the still photography. The Queen received rave reviews including from the New York Times and made film critics Rex Reed and Judith Crist’s 10 Best Films of the Year lists. At the Cannes Film Festival I was told by juror Roman Polanski that he and Truman Capote who was also on the jury that they were going to vote the film a special prize. Unfortunately the festival was cut short in 1968 when the French went on strike. I was there with Lewis Allen trying to sell distribution rights and we left deflated. I went back to LA where I had development deals with some studios and turned everything over to Lew at his sensible request. The movie was distributed in the U.S. by Grove Press, which had done well with I Am Curious Yellow. We were perhaps too inexperienced to know that the film’s short length of 68 minutes made it difficult for many theater owners to book it. I never received a dime for making The Queen but I am proud of it! To this day I cherish critic Martin Gottfried who raved that it was “made with an intelligence so secure it never need undermine a right attitude.”

For some reason Terry and I never got a chance to see The Queen during its initial run. Only in 2007 did I finally get to view a copy on VHS and I was surprised that Terry is only seen briefly sitting in the judges’ row next to Larry Rivers at Town Hall. But I do understand why The Queen is considered such an important work as it offers a rare glimpse into gay life pre–Stonewall where being homosexual and a drag queen was not an open matter. The movie makes no judgments as it follows the contestants, revealing some of their life stories, warts-and-all, as they prepare to compete for the pageant title. The producers and filmmaker should be proud of their work.

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Soon after Harlow had left the runway with tiara in hand (I later learned that he returned to Philadelphia, had a sex change operation a few years later and as Rachel Harlow became a very successful club and restaurant owner), we were back in England, for what in particular I don’t recall. It’s difficult to know what a writer is working on, especially one like Terry who used only a yellow legal pad and a soft pencil. I once passed by him lying on the couch with his eyes closed and said cheerfully, “Having a nap?” “No, I’m working,” he grumbled. Leaving William Burroughs (who was moving back to New York) in the carriage house, we checked into Browns Hotel in London. It was ancient, and hadn’t been renovated since the Dickensian Age. It had two entrances opening onto opposite blocks so that one could not be caught in a tryst. We had a coal fireplace with a pail of coal sitting on the hearth. In the evening a mystery person would slip into our room while we were out and build a cozy fire for our return. While Terry tended to his work assignment, I spent my days shopping for the badly sewn “mod” clothes that were fashionable at the moment and exploring the streets of London. We were invited to a number of openings and parties while in England. Cocaine had shown up on the scene; previously there was only pot and hash. Terry never bought any drugs; he didn’t have to. There was always plenty around to be shared. Actor Al Lettieri, a colorful fellow and an old friend of Terry’s, was living in London at this time. When he and Terry were young men living in Greenwich Village, they would hang out at Joe’s Café, which was a breakfastdiner kind of place. Today it is a wine bar for yuppies. Terry told me that Al was a junkie back then and that his older brother, who was in the Mafia, told Al in no uncertain terms to kick his habit or end up in the river. Terry was impressed because it motivated Al to quit doing drugs. Michael Parks, the handsome actor who played Adam in The Bible... In the Beginning, engaged Al as his acting coach for a film he was about to shoot in London. They took a boat across the Atlantic so they could work together during the crossing. While in town, Al was ensconced in a townhouse with his wife. Terry and I paid a visit and had a lovely time. I thought Al was quiet and gentle but he looked so much like a thug. That is probably why he was usually cast as a gangster or criminal. His most memorable role was to come as Virgil “The Turk” Solazzo in The Godfather. While waiting for Terry one day, Al and I went strolling through the streets of London. We wandered into a shoe store, and the salesman brought out some pumps for me to try on. Proudly, he held one up and said, “This is our latest color—nigger brown.” Al and I blanched and rushed out onto the street, having never heard anything so blatantly racist in our lives.

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By the time we got back to New York, Burroughs had found a place on the Bowery, where no one lived at the time but derelicts. The Bunker was in the basement gym of an abandoned boys’ school. It earned its name because it had no windows, but did have a row of urinals in the bathroom. The dining area was sparse except for a long table and chairs. The otherwise empty living room contained a walk-in, brightly colored orgone box, which was originally developed by Wilhelm Reich for sexual experimentation. Years later, in the Eighties, Terry and I were there one day when a film crew was shooting around the dining room table, and after a lovely lunch they wanted to see the orgone box. Burroughs obliged and invited Terry to join him in it, holding the small door open. Terry hesitated, “You won’t try anything weird, will you, Bill?” Burroughs assured him that he would not and they both disappeared inside. I believe this footage is included in Howard Brookner’s documentary Burroughs (1983). Terry’s father was a pharmacist, and Terry befriended druggists all the time. Irwin Gittelmen had a pharmacy on Madison Avenue. Terry would stop by to talk, and Irwin would give him a giant shopping bag of free sample packets that he had been saving for him. Terry would hail a taxi and rush down to the Bunker to show Burroughs. They would carefully go through each sample, discussing the merits of the ingredients. A heated debate would go on over a certain drug. They never took any of the samples but this game went on for years. In between goofing off with Burroughs, Terry began working on an adaptation of The Desperate Hours for producer David Susskind and ABCTV. Terry was hired by Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, whom he knew from his early days living in Paris. The show was filmed in New York with a cast including George Segal, Yvette Mimieux, Arthur Hill, and Teresa Wright. Terry’s good buddy William Claxton was hired as director of photography. As usual, Terry was on the set during the entire filming, which lasted about two weeks, and he hit it off immediately with George Segal who was so outgoing and funny. He had the type of personality that attracted Terry, helping him shed his shyness. They became lifelong buddies. Coincidentally, Terry already knew George’s older brother Fred from Greenwich Village. George credits Fred with teaching him everything he knew, including learning to play the ukulele and songs of the 1920s. Fred was a writer and an intellectual and, the one time I was around him, a very humorous guy. Terry was excited to also work with Teresa Wright. He was a big fan of the movie The Best Years of Our Lives in which Teresa co-starred. She was older then but still made more of an impression on him than the younger, prettier Yvette Mimieux, whom Terry didn’t seem to notice in the least. The filming of The Desperate Hours went smoothly and it was so well-

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received, that Terry teamed up again with director Kotcheff, Segal and Claxton to remake the classic Of Mice and Men for TV. Segal starred as George with Scottish actor Nicol Williamson as Lennie and Joey Heatherton as Mae. It was an excellent production and powerfully acted. George was simply marvelous and Nicol nailed his American accent so perfectly that most viewers didn’t realize he was born and raised in Scotland. In between productions, we spent Thanksgiving with George, his beautiful wife Marion Sobel, and their adopted daughters Polly and Elizabeth (age five and nine) in their Upper West Side apartment. Breaking with tradition, Marion served lobster, which I thought was a fantastic sign of her originality and nonconformity. As for Terry, he would have been satisfied with a martini and a hot dog so not having turkey didn’t bother him in the least. George’s children went to a French school, and even at this young age they were intelligent and gracious. Terry and George spent a lot of time together. George would get Terry to just wander the streets of the city to see how many people recognized him. He was checking out his “Q score,” which is what the industry uses to measure a star’s appeal. The fashion that year for young women was Maxi Coats and platform shoes. As the snow and then deep slush gathered at every street corner, they would watch pretty girls trip over their Maxis and end up in the gutter. Gentlemen as they were I know they just walked on by laughing. Terry sadly lost his playmate when George decided to relocate to LA where the movie work was to be found. He packed up his family and moved out west where he had quite a successful run on the big screen with a number of sophisticated comedies including Loving (1970), The Owl and the Pussycat (1970), Where’s Poppa? (1970) (a favorite of his as he told us he really liked working with Ruth Gordon), The Hot Rock (1972), and A Touch of Class (1973). George became a bona fide movie star and was very busy during this period so we didn’t see much of him until the mid–Seventies.

5. Uneasy Rider Peter Fonda showed up at the carriage house on East 36th Street one rainy night in November of 1967. The son of Henry Fonda and sister of Jane, Peter gave an impressive, Golden Globe–nominated performance as a solider in The Victors (1963) but the studios tabbed him a new romantic lead, pairing him with Sandra Dee in the corny Tammy and the Doctor (1963) and with Sharon Hugueny in The Young Lovers (1964). Fonda was saved from becoming another Troy Donahue when American International Pictures asked him to step in at the last minute as a replacement for actor George Chakiris, who balked at doing his own motorcycle riding in Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966). Peter played Heavenly Blues, the leader of a local Hell’s Angels motorcycle club chapter. The film was an immediate hit and suddenly a longhaired Peter Fonda was cool in the eyes of the youth culture. Signed to do two more films for AIP, Fonda next starred as a TV commercial director who decides to experiment with LSD in The Trip (1967). He had one more film owed on his contract and that’s when he knocked on our door. Terry had known Peter Fonda from the time he arrived in Hollywood in 1964 when it was a sleepy town in the doldrums between cinematic highs, and the children of the great stars of another era were trying to develop careers ... or not. Terry and I spent time at the Malibu home of Bobby Walker where we met and became friendly with Peter. Terry was expecting Peter when he turned up at our doorstep on that chilly autumn night. While Terry was in Rome a few weeks prior he had lunch with Peter, who was making a movie for Roger. Peter shared with Terry an idea for a film that came to him in a hotel room in Toronto. Per Terry, it was first about two daredevil racecar drivers being exploited by greedy promoters but when Peter realized that he owned American International Pictures one more biker film it then morphed into a tale about two bikers who score some dope, go on a road trip, and have a series of “interesting incidences.” Terry was very enthusiastic about the project but Peter felt he wouldn’t have enough in the budget to pay Terry’s fee to write the script. After I let Peter into our home, he reiterated the plot once again to Terry and said he had a title for the movie, something like The Loners. Terry, sitting on our 88

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golden couch, raised his hand to indicate a marquee and said, “Why not call it Easy Rider?” Terry once again expressed great interest in writing the screenplay. My recollection, which differs from Peter’s, is that the rest of the conversation went something like this: PETER: We can’t afford you Terry. Can you do it on deferment? TERRY: I can’t, but I’ll do it for scale and a percentage. Who is going to direct? PETER: Dennis Hopper. TERRY: Are you sure?!

Dennis had never directed before and had such a bad reputation at this time. Despite his trepidation about Hopper, Terry agreed with the understanding of receiving a percentage of the profits and was to come up with the “interesting incidences.” Fonda was pleased, and rushed out into the night. This was the era of oral agreements and handshake deals, and Terry had no reason to doubt Peter. Despite the fact that he had co-authored such well-received movies as Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid, and Barbarella, Terry wasn’t getting any offers in the U.S. at this time. I thought it was a little strange (soon we would learn that the FBI had a hand in Terry not working) but I was not involved in his business. I assumed he had smart New York and Los Angeles people working in his “best interests,” but it seems that they were looking out for their own welfare, where Terry only thought of the next project. Terry said to me once, “An agent never got me a job, but was always there to take their percentage.” Peter returned after the holidays and moved into the monk-like halffurnished room on the third floor. He and Terry finally got down to business, hired a typist who had worked many years in Washington, D.C., and started on the series of “interesting incidences.” They worked nonstop all day for about a month, Terry with his yellow pad and pencil, and Peter pacing around the living room—the better to think. The typist would come by about five o’clock in the afternoon and type up the pages, triple-spaced, and then Terry would work on the script some more into the wee hours of the night. One night, very late, Peter had gone out on the town while Terry continued to work with the typist. They finished up and were just talking while I made drinks. She mentioned that she had done a lot of typing for the government, and that these classified documents she was working on had to do with how there are people from outer space walking around amongst us and working for the government. They looked just like us, had infiltrated the highest offices, and had blended right in. After she left, Terry got right to work on it and incorporated this into

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a scene he wrote with his good friend Rip Torn in mind. The part was that of the “Faulkner-like” country lawyer eventually played by Jack Nicholson in the movie. As Wyatt and Billy sit around a campfire with the lawyer getting stoned, he regales the bikers with this conspiracy theory about the government covering up the existence of aliens. Terry showed the scene to Rip and asked if he would do it. Rip was busy with rehearsals for his new play The Cuban Thing, which, coincidentally, was the same play I had auditioned for but didn’t get. Rip said he would try to do the movie if his schedule worked out. Eventually Dennis Hopper, who was to direct Easy Rider, arrived. Early in his career, Hopper was being compared to James Dean. A confrontation with legendary director Henry Hathaway on the set of From Hell to Texas in 1958 pretty much blackballed him from the film industry though he remained active on television. Terry had met Dennis in 1965 when he was hired by Vogue to do a magazine piece on Hopper’s then-wife Brooke Hayward, daughter of the Broadway producer Leland Hayward. Dennis was not working as an actor at the time, but as a photographer. They had a house in the Hollywood Hills, and Dennis had quite a collection of contemporary art. Terry entitled his article, “The Loved House of the Dennis Hoppers.” We stayed friendly with Brooke and Dennis (Terry, always with the nicknames, called him “Den”), and we’d go to the house for dinner. Brooke would serve something wonderful and wisely go to bed. Dennis and Terry would retire, with drinks in hand, to the living room, which had a disconcerting dentist’s chair. I would find a cozy sofa and watch Dennis and Terry talk. Dennis would expound on his idea of how Shakespeare should be spoken, and rant on about a film he wanted to direct called The Last Movie, which he eventually managed to make. Terry loved madness and people behaving badly (and you couldn’t get any madder or badder than Hopper). Terry would draw this behavior out, and then go home and write “fiction.” When Dennis showed up at our house in New York we let him stay in Nile’s room, which he complained about and rudely called “a closet.” I tried to stay out of the way as best I could. Dennis was there for about two weeks, and at night he and Peter would be pacing around my living room, gesturing, and throwing out ideas between passing joints between the three of them. Terry, a martini man, would just hold the joint and pass it along most times. Somebody had to stay straight to do the writing so Terry sat with his pencil and a long yellow pad on our golden couch, scribbling away. He would hand the pages to the typist and she would type them up immediately. Dennis would rant and rave, using a lot of four-letter words, and the typist would break into tears and run sobbing out into the night. Terry would have to call the typing pool the next day and get another typist. Terry suggested that they

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change the “drug of choice” from marijuana to cocaine (which was not in fashion yet) because pot was too bulky to be carrying on the motorcycles. Dennis thought that running the credits upside down might be interesting, and he also whined about the two characters having to die. Terry loved collaborating. He always felt that two heads were better than one when creating a story or screenplay. Terry was really in his element sharing concepts with Peter and Dennis. He just loved to work in this free-forall fashion with people yelling out story ideas while he nestled on the sofa jotting down the better ones. Peter once remarked that Terry agreed to work on Easy Rider on a handshake, “just for the sake of having the freedom to play with an idea that appealed to his individual nature.” This statement is oh-so-true. Terry had the scripts neatly bound and held onto the original. He handed copies to Peter and Dennis, and off they went back to Hollywood. Terry also gave a script to Rip Torn, who has retained his copy after all these years. Peter, who owed American International Pictures one more movie, took the script to company heads James Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff. Peter and Dennis were trying to use this biker movie to make a more interesting statement about the current state of affairs in the U.S. but also as a springboard to launch Dennis’ directing career. But due to the proposed budget and the rampant drug use, AIP turned it down, to Arkoff’s lasting regret. Fonda then made an agreement with Bert Schneider who, along with director Bob Rafelson, brought The Monkees to television and produced their movie Head in 1968. Bert had a production deal with Columbia Pictures, which wound up distributing the movie. However, there was a stipulation as the studio gave Dennis and Peter about $40,000 to go to New Orleans Mardi Gras to shoot some test footage, which was eventually used in the film, to see if they could really pull off making a movie. This shoot was scheduled to commence in March. At the last minute, someone was bright enough to check and discovered Mardi Gras that year was in February so the rush was on to get to New Orleans for the parade, where one of the last scenes (Peter’s soliloquy) was to be shot in a graveyard. A photo exists of Terry and Peter discussing it, with Fonda clutching the script. Terry and I flew down to New Orleans and found the cast and crew settled in a crummy motel at the airport. We caught the end of the parade and then went to the graveyard for Peter’s scene. When night came, there was no crew to light the set. In the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the SexDrugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind, a crew member said that there was so much chaos, someone’s girlfriend had to hold the Sun Gun. I was that person. I had no idea what a Sun Gun was when I

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volunteered to help while standing late at night in a boggy, soggy New Orleans cemetery. Some guy’s voice came out of the dark and said, “We have no one to hold the Sun Gun.” Trying to be helpful, I chirped, “I’ll do it!” Before I knew what was happening, a couple of burly guys strapped this giant, heavy battery pack around my waist, which caused me to sink further into the bog. I was to hold this pole the size of a broomstick with a bright light on the end and keep it steady on Peter’s face while he did his monologue. This was a lengthy speech and it took all night to shoot. I tried so hard to keep the pole steady, while I continued to sink further and further into the misty marsh. Peter was emoting like mad, and the crew was concentrating, knowing this was going to be a one-take shot that they only had one chance to get. Luckily, they got it. If not, I’m afraid that I might have disappeared completely into the bog, never to be heard from again. Everyone slept all the next day, which is odd for people who are supposed to be shooting a movie. In the morning I went wandering and found a classic New Orleans funeral. I saw the Dirge and later the joyful exit, and the Second Line with umbrellas in the light drizzle of rain. Later that afternoon, we gathered in someone’s room in the motel. It had been raining all day, and Dennis insisted he needed the camera to film the neon lights reflected in the puddles. No one was about to give Dennis a camera. I went back to our room and didn’t see the camera go through the motel’s plate glass window. The next day I told Terry that I was going back to New York. I returned home to East 36th Street, and a few days later Terry showed up. He looked perturbed but was tight-lipped about it. When I asked him what went on after I left, all he would manage to bark out was a “Hrrrmph.” Actress Karen Black, who played a New Orleans prostitute in the film, said Dennis’ behavior became so unruly that Terry turned to him and said, “The cacophony of your verbiage is driving me insane.” There was nothing more to shoot in New Orleans that I know of, and I guess they all decamped. The filming was finished for the moment. Peter and Dennis returned to Hollywood with the screenplay to raise the rest of the money. Everyone in the film business knows you can’t get financing without a script. In the early summer, after Columbia agreed to release Easy Rider, there was a meeting in a restaurant on the Upper East Side to discuss shooting the rest of the movie with Peter, Dennis, Terry, Rip Torn, myself, and a director whose name I can’t remember. Dennis was late so we went ahead and ordered drinks and appetizers. Terry was sitting on my left and Dennis’ place was on my right. I was the only woman at the table. Rip was on the other side of the round table, and so was Peter, who was talking to a couple of pretty girls sitting nearby. Dennis soon showed up in full Easy Rider regalia—long

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hair, bushy mustache, and fringed buckskin jacket. He didn’t sit down but continued to stand on my right at his place at the table. Agitated, he exclaimed, “Man, I’ve been lookin’ for shootin’ locations in Texas and man, I’m lucky I’m still alive. Those mother-fuckin’, redneck bastards!” He then spotted Rip across the table and said, “Hey, Rip, you’re from fuckin’ Texas, aren’t you?” Rip replied, “Yes, but don’t judge all bastards by me.” Dennis continued his ranting and, still standing, picked up the knife at his place setting and leaned across the table, brandishing the knife at Rip. Rip, who had been in the army and was a tough Texan, didn’t even get up, but leaned over the table, grabbed Dennis’ wrist, and twisted. The knife clanked to the table. Peter, who had been leaning back in his chair and balancing on two legs so he could flirt with the girls, fell over backwards. Rip, controlling his temper, offered to meet Dennis outside to finish the fight, and left the restaurant. Dennis sat down, acting as if nothing had happened, and continued to dominate the conversation all through dinner. Needless to say, Rip refused to work with Dennis and backed out of the movie. He not only lost out on a memorable movie role but unfortunately for Rip the controversial play he was starring in, The Cuban Thing (about a Cuban family during Fidel Castro’s revolution), closed after opening night. During previews, a Cuban resistance group bombed the theater in protest of the play. Scrambling to find a replacement for Rip, Peter reportedly talked with William Wellman, Jr., about a role but when Wellman learned that Dennis was co-starring and directing he opted to work in a Bob Hope comedy instead. Finally, they found someone who would work with Dennis: Jack Nicholson, who was recommended by Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider. It was a star-making role for Jack, which was not surprising as Terry wrote wonderful dialogue for the character and Jack brilliantly brought to life this straight, laconic Southern lawyer who smokes marijuana for the first time. At this point Terry had moved onto his next endeavor while Peter and Dennis traveled the country filming Easy Rider from Terry’s script. Sometime in late 1968, Terry and I were in Southern California staying at the Chateau Marmont. We had brought his son Nile and Terry’s favorite dog Hunter (the dumbest pure bred English Pointer I had ever met). I decided to take a walk to the liquor store when who should pull up in his car but Dennis Hopper. He gave me a lift and then whined the whole way about how Peter and the producers snatched the Easy Rider negative away from him because they weren’t happy with his three-hour cut of the movie. He complained and bemoaned that they were going to ruin his vision, never once giving Terry credit for any of the story ideas. Terry, Nile and I left LA for a skiing jaunt in Big Bear without ever finding out who won the battle

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between Dennis and Peter. It was to be the first of many between those two. Instead, Nile and I enjoyed our time on the slopes while Terry, pencil and pad in hand, remained at the bar hard at work on his next project, the screenplay for The Magic Christian. Even though Terry created most of the dialogue for Easy Rider, Peter and Dennis wanted a co-writing credit. They called him after watching a few screenings in LA. Though he felt it was an unfair demand, Terry got on the phone to the Writers Guild anyway, secure in his position as creator of Easy Rider. The Guild at first balked as it is apparently very strict about not giving directors and producers writing credit. Terry convinced the Guild that indeed they had done their share. He said, “The lads need a break.” Terry’s decision to help them out was all done in the spirit of “camaraderie.” They were all great friends at the time so Terry did it without much thought. Little did he know how much his “good buddies” would take advantage in the end. Terry and I were in Europe when Easy Rider was released and by the time we returned to the States, Terry was dumbfounded that the movie had become such a huge hit. It resonated with a restless younger audience that was dissatisfied with the establishment and rebelled against it every way they could, from taking drugs to practicing free love to protesting the Vietnam War. They identified with Wyatt (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper), non-conformist outlaw hippie bikers who after scoring some cocaine in Mexico and selling it to a big-time dealer (the notorious Phil Spector) in Los Angeles, stuff the cash in a plastic tube hidden in their gas tanks and head out on the highway toward an imagined Utopian life in Florida. Along the way Wyatt and Billy smoke lots of grass and have some “interesting incidences” with a colorful cast of characters including a hitchhiking hippie (Luke Askew), some free-spirited commune dwellers (Robert Walker, Jr, Sabrina Scharf, Luana Anders), a drunken Southern ACLU lawyer named George who gets high for the first time (Jack Nicholson), two New Orleans hookers (Karen Black, Toni Basil), and various local hippie-hating rednecks, two of which do them in. Despite the surprise downbeat ending, the film was extremely popular and featured stunning photography (courtesy of Laszlo Kovacs) of the two bikers barreling along desert highways and mountainous back roads accompanied by classic rock songs on the soundtrack. Terry’s screenplay made some sharp observations about the hypocrisy of the late Sixties counterculture and Middle America Christian values. In the most talked-about scene, Wyatt, Billy, and Jack Nicholson’s character George sit around a campfire, get stoned and muse about UFOs. At the time Nicholson went on record and stated that he did not make up any of the dialogue. He told interviewer Neil Weaver in After Dark magazine, “That

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long scene by the campfire ... I did with the script. It’s hidden under that coat you see ... it looks improvised, but most of it was written in advance.” That is the truth as Terry wrote it back in New York. Dennis, however, has always claimed that practically the entire film but in particular that scene was improvised. Below is an excerpt directly taken from page 114 of the screenplay now housed in The New York Public Library: Wyatt: You’re just stoned man. Billy: Stoned, my ass! This is pot—this ain’t acid. I’m not hallucinating for God’s sake. I tell you I was watching this satellite—suddenly it zigzagged, flashed three times and zoomed away! George: That was a UFO, beamin’ back at you, that’s all. Eric Heisman and I were down in Mexico a few weeks back and we saw 40 of ’em flying in formation. They got bases, you know, all over the world. They been coming here since 1946 when the scientists started bouncin’ radar beams off the Moon. The governments know all about it. They’ve been livin’ and working here in vast numbers, ever since.

Easy Rider won praise from the critics as well with Terry leading “the Lads” to Academy Award and Writers Guild nominations for Best Original Screenplay. The movie grossed between $40 and 60 million at the box office but Terry didn’t get a penny. The offer of a percentage of the gross to Terry was quickly forgotten when the movie surprisingly turned a huge profit. Though Terry opted not to go on location with the movie, it did not mean he was giving up his percentage, which seems to be what was interpreted by all involved. Terry only accepted the verbal deal of being paid $350 a week to write the screenplay in exchange for a share of the profits, which he thought was promised him. Never was it mentioned that he would get a producing credit. He was an Academy Award–nominated screenwriter and he would never have agreed to author the screenplay for Easy Rider for such a low weekly wage. Peter knew that when he told Terry from the get-go that they couldn’t afford him as Terry’s fee was too high. But with Terry out-of-sight and out-of-mind, Peter alledgedly negotiated away Terry’s promised cut by splitting it between his production company Pando Company and producer Bill Hayward, Dennis’ then-brother-in-law, to Hopper’s chagrin. Terry’s lack of interest in business matters caused him to fail to get something in writing from Peter, foolishly thinking their “word” would suffice since they were friends. To add insult to injury, purportedly when the film began raking in the big bucks, people associated with the movie, such as Jack Nicholson and some of the crew, were additionally compensated but no extra

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money ever came Terry’s way. To Terry’s amusement, Dennis sued Peter on two separate occasions for Terry’s percentage of the gross! “Vicious greed” got the best of Peter and Dennis, was what Terry used to say. Friends have always wondered why Terry never sued Peter and Dennis. Even in the Nineties, Rip Torn and others were still asking why. Terry was a trusting soul and not the kind of guy to take someone to court. He hated negativity and would just brush those feelings aside. When somebody made him what he thought was a promise, he took them at their word and always hoped they would do the right thing. That is a wonderful trait to have but not in Hollywood where nice guys always finish last. At one point in the early Seventies, money became really tight and he was in financial difficulty, having to support an ex-wife and son. Desperate, he wrote a letter to Dennis pleading for “one point of the action” from Easy Rider for writing the screenplay. Dennis claimed to never have received the note. In 1983, word got back to Terry that Peter and Dennis wanted to make a sequel to Easy Rider. Terry was offended and exclaimed, “How can they make a sequel when we killed off both the characters?” A script or story treatment called Biker Heaven was attempted but never went anywhere. Throughout the years, Dennis told a revisionist story within the industry that Rip Torn had pulled a knife on him at dinner. One night in May of 1994, he told his tale to Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. Rip was understandably upset and asked Terry what he should do. After he couldn’t get a retraction from Hopper, he hired lawyer Robert S. Chapman and sued for defamation of character and loss of wages due to Hopper’s malicious lie. Both Terry and I were asked to give depositions since we were witnesses to the incident. Terry had little or no energy, and would soon die, but one day I drove two hours to a lawyer’s office in Stamford, Connecticut, and we gave our statements corroborating Rip’s claim that Dennis pulled the knife on him. I testified for three hours, and after a lunch break, Terry testified for five hours. When hearing Dennis’ version, Terry quipped, “Well, that’s supremely ironic, isn’t it, that he should tell it exactly backwards?” He told the lawyers that he stopped considering Dennis a good friend after asking for his help a number of times over the years and being rebuffed or ignored repeatedly. The ironic thing about this was that Dennis was still insisting that he and he alone wrote Easy Rider. He boasted that he wrote it in three weeks after becoming frustrated with Terry and Peter’s supposedly slow progress, but didn’t have the script any longer, or maybe he put it on tape, but he didn’t have that either. Terry once said that Dennis “couldn’t write a letter.” He told writer Mike Golden, “If Den Hopper improvises a dozen lines and six of them survive the cutting room floor he’ll put in for a screenplay credit.

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It would be almost impossible to exaggerate his contribution to [Easy Rider]—but, by George, he manages to do it every time.” The screenplay emerged as a substantial matter in the case because Dennis brought it up in his deposition and Chapman wanted to use this as an attack on his credibility. While this was happening with Dennis, Peter Fonda materialized out of the blue. One summer before Terry died, he called me into the hall to listen to a message on the answering machine. It was from Peter, who Terry had not seen or heard from (guilty conscience, perhaps?) since the early filming of Easy Rider in New Orleans in 1968. With a note of desperation in his voice, he said, “Terry, why don’t you want to work with us? I’m offering you $30,000 to take your name off the script so we can make a sequel.” A furious Terry said, “How could they remove my name when I got an Academy Award nomination for the film? He is trying to pull an ‘end run.’” I hadn’t seen Terry that angry since the last time they tried to make a sequel in the Eighties. By the time Rip’s trial began in December of 1996, Terry had passed away but his pretrial deposition was entered into the record. I flew out to LA to testify. On the witness stand, Dennis, under oath, once again claimed he wrote Easy Rider though he couldn’t produce a typed screenplay or the audiotape he claimed to have made. He accused Terry of committing perjury by agreeing with Rip’s version of events and wailed, “It broke my fucking heart.... Because I considered Terry Southern one of my best friends.” After he was excused from the witness stand, Dennis spotted me and came over and said very friendly, “Hi, Gail. How are you?” With the Easy Rider script in my lap, I replied coolly, “Fine, Dennis.” He then left the courtroom and departed for Italy. During the lunch break, I sat with Rip in a locked office with floorto-ceiling windows sixty stories up, waiting to testify. Gazing across the Los Angeles basin, I thought if only I could fly I could get out of there. During this time, lawyers kept rushing in and out asking Rip if he would settle. He agreed, but apparently Dennis refused. After lunch I was called to the stand. Sitting in the witness box, I sat there feeling stunned. This was not like it was when I guest starred on Perry Mason during my acting years. I had no lines from a script to recite, so I just sat there and forgot all about the screenplay on my lap. One of Rip’s attorneys asked me if I had any information that would shed light on Dennis’ testimony. I said, “Yes.” “Do you know who wrote Easy Rider?” he asked. I once again answered yes. Finally, with exasperation in his voice, he asked, “Do you have anything to show us?” I remembered the fragile, thirty-year-old screenplay on my lap, and I said, “I have the script.” Everyone started rushing around like cockroaches when you turn on the light. Both lawyers hurried over to inspect it as I lifted it up for them to see. The judge, who couldn’t leave the bench, almost fell over trying to

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rubberneck. They handed it around, and then gave it back to me. This greatly helped Rip win as the court deemed Dennis “not a credible witness” and found that there was not a single witness or piece of evidence to back up Hopper’s claim. The judge ordered Dennis to pay Rip $475,000 plus legal fees. Hopper appealed and the court upheld the award. Peter Fonda, with all the backbone of a snake, never testified, claiming he couldn’t recall what happened. Despite the fact that Rip won his case against Hopper in part because I produced the Easy Rider screenplay proving that Dennis was not credible, two years later he once again claimed full authorship. While participating in a panel discussion about “The Art of the Motorcycle” at the Guggenheim Museum, the issue of Terry not receiving his just due was brought up by a member of the audience during a Q&A session. Dennis was quoted by a New York Times reporter who was covering the event as saying, “I flew to New York and ten days after I came out with a screenplay. And that was it. Why am I the whipping boy in all this?” If that wasn’t bad enough, Dennis continued his delusional outrageous ranting in author Mark Cousins’ 2002 book Scene by Scene: Film Actors and Directors Discuss Their Work when he said, “Terry Southern didn’t write one word of Easy Rider. Not one of his ideas is incorporated in Easy Rider. Terry Southern broke his hip, was unavailable and the only reason his name is on the screen is because Bert Schneider wanted it.” Terry never broke his hip— where does Dennis come up with this stuff? When Cousins mentioned Rip Torn winning the lawsuit against him, Dennis incredulously replied, “I lost money because they all came in and testified against me.” Let me say that I would do it again in a heartbeat! And as late as April 2008, according to journalist David Savage writing for CinemaRetro magazine, Hopper was once again boasting how he and Peter Fonda wrote Easy Rider without one mention of Terry during a Q&A at the TriBeca Film Festival in New York City after the screening of his movie Night Tide. Peter Fonda too still downplays Terry’s contribution to Easy Rider. In an interview he gave to Army Archerd for Variety in late 2007, he said he and Dennis wrote the script with Jack Nicholson in mind for the role of the ACLU lawyer. He went on to remark, “Terry Southern gave us the title.” I was simply heartbroken to read that Peter had forgotten that he lived with us in New York when he came to Terry with that story idea and how Terry not only thought up the memorable title but wrote the screenplay with input from Peter and then Dennis. I guess as Peter grows older, he too remembers events as he wants them to be but not as they actually happened. Or perhaps after all these years, “vicious greed” as (Terry used to say) is still getting the better of “the Lads.”

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If Fonda and Hopper’s claims of writing Easy Rider without much input from Terry are true, then why haven’t they written anything of merit since? Hopper received story credit for his disastrous film The Last Movie (1971) and Peter co-wrote the screenplay for a forgettable film called Fatal Mission (1990). That is the extent of their screenwriting careers. A few years after Terry passed away, George Plimpton phoned me in my sixth floor walkup in Hell’s Kitchen. I hadn’t seen him since Terry’s memorial and have no idea how he got my telephone number. He wanted to know if I had the Easy Rider script. I said I did. He asked me to send a copy of the Jack Nicholson scene to him for an article he was writing, which now I think was just a ploy to make sure that I actually had it. I did, and about an hour later I got another call from George informing me that a book dealer was going to call me and that I should give the screenplay to him because it wasn’t worth much, maybe five thousand dollars at most, and it wouldn’t be worth any more for a long time. Right away the phone rang again and it was the book dealer, who asked me if I had the script. I said I did, and he said his office was not far away and why don’t I run over with it, and he will buy me a cup of coffee. Of course I wasn’t stupid enough to fall for this and always wondered what George’s motive was. I thought my connection to Easy Rider finally came to an end when I donated the typed script with Terry’s handwritten notes in the margins to The New York Public Library, to be stored with the rest of Terry’s papers. But while living in Chicago a few years ago, a woman who lived across the street said, “My brother knows you.” The brother came to Chicago for a family reunion and I met him, a jolly, easy-going fellow. Sure enough, he was the guy who built the motorcycle that Peter Fonda rode in Easy Rider. Peter actually came up with the idea of the original bike design with the extended front end, teardrop gas tank, and high handlebars. This fellow had to travel everywhere the bike went, to keep it running. He was in New Orleans for the scenes there, and was promised money and credits, but never got either. “The Lads” struck again.

6. Hippies, Yippies, and a Girl Named Candy While we were embroiled in our Easy Rider saga, world events were happening at a lightning pace. The year 1968 began with a tearful President Johnson announcing he would not run for a second term. The TV news was showing color footage of Vietnam being bombed and strafed with bright orange fireballs. In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Later Bobby Kennedy was shot while running for president. That spring, the boat went back into the water but a snag hit our summer plans. Terry came to me shamefaced, explaining that his wife would not let him see his seven-year-old son unless he got rid of “Miss Beach Ball.” I was embarrassed for him and thought it was a calculating move on her part that was sure to drive him further away. We didn’t argue over it as I understood and I decided to go to Vancouver. I figured “Van,” as Terry called it, might be fun for a while. American draft dodgers were streaming across the Canadian border to avoid being sent to Vietnam. I figured I’d go to see for myself. I called my mother and told her that I was coming for a visit. She and her husband Carl Dudda (a former German POW who was imprisoned by the Russians for eight years after the war ended) lived deep in the woods on an island. Very political, she informed me that she was housing some young guys who were escaping the draft from the U.S. and we would not be alone. One night she woke up and had to step over a dozen sleeping bags to get to the bathroom. Canada was being invaded again. Well, with all those cute American fellows around, a girl couldn’t help but be tempted. In spite of endless phone calls from a wary Terry, I managed an affair with a dreamy, dark-eyed boy. Our “romance” petered out after a short period and since Terry was still spending time with his son Nile in what he called his “Lad and Dad” exercise, I flew to LA and checked into the Chateau Marmont, which was still cheap and shabby. To my surprise and utter delight, Michael Cooper was there with sexy rock ’n’ roll musician Gram Parsons who for some reason I didn’t sleep with despite Gram’s many advances. I thought he was a really cool guy even though I was not familiar 100

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with his music but did learn that he had recently played with The Byrds and hung out with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger from The Rolling Stones. Terry was still relentless in his pursuit of me and invited me to join him in Chicago where he was covering the Democratic Convention for Esquire magazine with Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and John Berendt, who gave them their marching orders. As Terry wrote, We met in the queer little Downstairs Lounge, one of several bars in our hotel, the Chicago-Sheraton, and John Berendt was quick to charge us with our respective assignments: “You Jean Jack Genet, on the alert for all manner of criminality and perversion in high places! You, Big Bill Burroughs, let your keen and experienced eye discern any sign of sense derangement through the use of drugs by these delegates, the nominees, and officials of every station! Now then, you, T. Southern, on double alert for all manner of absurdity at this convention!”

Before I left LA, I suggested to Michael Cooper that he might be interested in joining us, and off I went for the Windy City. At the Hilton Hotel, Terry was happy to see me, and said that there was a gathering in Lincoln Park that night; about 2000 young people (or as Terry called them “yip-yip Yippies”) were planning to camp out but the city, following the orders of Mayor Richard Daley, would not give them a permit. We went to Lincoln Park in the late afternoon with Jean Genet who in his youth had been a street urchin, a petty thief, and a homosexual. Now only a homosexual, he became a noted controversial author, playwright and political activist. Genet couldn’t get a visa into the U.S. because he was a felon and had to enter the country illegally through Canada saying “Je sui Canadienne.” He didn’t speak a word of English. Taking a liking to me, he would say, “O belle” with his arms outstretched. Genet traveled with Richard Seaver who acted as translator and at one point Genet asked, “Is Hugh Hefner a fag?” People were milling about and Terry and I stumbled upon poet Allen Ginsberg sitting under a tree chanting “Omm-mum” surrounded by a group of hippies. We joined them for a while and then met up with Burroughs to watch twilight fall on the park. Around the perimeter, police cars were approaching, and one was positioned near the entrance. Rumors were flying that sleeping in the park would be all right despite the mayor’s edict. The crowd was tense and nervous anyway. Soon the police car at the entrance began to move slowly into the park and stopped. People became more agitated. Allen began to chant louder. Terry said that there were police provocateurs amongst us and to watch carefully because he predicted someone would soon cause trouble. He had just finished saying it when sure enough it happened. A guy with “a pig-bristle haircut wearing a Notre Dame t-shirt” (as described by Terry) stepped out

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from behind a tree and threw a brick, smashing the police car’s windshield. The circling police cars zeroed in, and cops on foot came out of nowhere. They shouted and shot tear gas at us, which hung like a cloud in the air. Panic set in and people began running in all directions to get out of the park. Terry, Genet, and me in a mini-skirt and high heels (needless to say, I wasn’t dressed for a riot) ran as fast as we could out of the park. We found ourselves on a quiet street but could hear the commotion behind us getting closer. I saw a red brick-walled garden and pushed the gate, which swung open. I ducked inside. Terry and Genet were so close behind they almost ran me over. We crouched in the garden wondering what to do next and heard the boots of the police run past us on the other side of the wall. I suggested we ring the doorbell. Since I was a woman and the most presentable, they said I should do it in case the people inside were unfriendly or armed. My heroes! Chivalry was dead with these guys. I pushed a button and a friendly female voice came over the intercom. I explained that we had hidden in her garden and didn’t know what to do. She surprisingly buzzed us in without asking who we were and invited us up to her apartment. The brave duo elected me to trot up the stairs first. When we reached the landing, the door was open and a young couple, both college students, welcomed us. We introduced ourselves and the young man was flabbergasted on meeting Genet since he was writing his dissertation on the famous writer! They sat around talking for many hours in French, with the couple completely fascinated with what Terry and especially Genet had to say about the war, politics, and life in general, while I dozed on the couch. When it got dark enough, the hospitable kids called a cab and led us down the back way into the alley. They were so glad that we had dropped in. Back at the hotel, Terry and I went to the bar, which was street-level and enclosed in glass, and ordered brandy to steady our nerves. We were sitting there contemplating dinner while nursing our drinks when the glass shattered at one end of the bar. To our surprise, a skinny blonde kid in blue jeans stepped gingerly through the shards of glass but then he stumbled and fell. He was trailed by a line of policemen shouting and waving their batons. It was just like a scene from the Keystone Cops movies. We were so startled that we quickly drank up (Terry would never let a drink go to waste) and went into the lobby. Exiting the hotel through the revolving door, we found ourselves amid a crowd of people on the street. We were trapped along the hotel’s perimeter and couldn’t move. It was a melee. A movie had just finished and the audience happened to stream out of the theater right into the commotion. A paddy wagon with the back door open was parked and the cops were clubbing everyone on the head indiscriminately and throwing them in, including the innocent moviegoers who had no idea what was going on. A

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middle-aged woman with an English accent shouted over the din that she was a Member of Parliament, but they carted her away anyway. We made it back into the hotel and, exhausted from the long day, went to our room and ordered room service. I called Michael Cooper who was in LA and told him he should get here fast. The next morning, Michael arrived just in time for a big rally in Grant Park. Terry and I rendezvoused with him, Burroughs, Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Seaver, his French wife Jeanette, and John Berendt from Esquire. Terry said they were going to nominate a pig for president. Sure enough, someone came by carrying a squealing hog. Seats were set up around the band shell, and we stood there anxiously waiting for the event to begin. Soon an announcement was made that they were going to arrest people, and anyone who didn’t want to spend the night in jail should leave immediately. In the meantime, the National Guard backed with tanks and weapons began to seal off the park exits. Terry, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Genet and I started walking in a line with Michael walking backwards, taking photos of us. I tried to move to the side so that Michael could get a picture of these heavyweight writers together but he moved back and kept me in the shot. At this point I was extremely nervous and all I wanted to do was to be anywhere but in that park. My face in the pictures reveals my anxiety. Terry and the rest were prepared to get arrested, but I was not! Suddenly clouds of tear gas enveloped the park and protesters started to run. I began to panic. Burroughs on the other hand was just thrilled. He wore a brown three-piece suit with a matching vest and a brown fedora. He looked like he should have PRESS in his hat-band like reporters wore during the Forties. Cops surrounded us waving their batons and people began to scatter. Burroughs stood there looking at these rag-tag students and hippies and with his twitching smile he said quietly, under his breath, “If you want a revolution, you should get a suit.” I told Terry I’d meet him back at the hotel and I impetuously dashed off by myself to try to get the hell out of there. He didn’t try to stop me, knowing how willful I was and knowing I could take care of myself. Tanks and soldiers were blocking my escape so I went to the next exit. That one also had a contingent of armed military men. I went in the opposite direction from the crowd, towards the lake, and found myself on Lakeshore Drive with traffic whizzing by and no walkway for pedestrians. Somehow I made it back to the hotel. Terry strolled in later and announced that we were going to the Democratic Convention that night. I thought, “Will this nightmare ever end?” We arrived at the International Amphitheatre where we met Burroughs, Genet, Ginsberg, Cooper, and the Seavers. Even though we were wearing our identity badges from Esquire, we were stopped at the entrance by the police.

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The cops were especially suspicious of Cooper, who was decked out in his pink velvet wide-lapel jacket, long hair, sandals, and British accent. Terry described it as “exactly like approaching a military installation: barbed wire, checkpoints, the whole bit.” When we finally got in, the place was a madhouse packed with delegates shouting while waving banners identifying each state. I was afraid of being separated from the others in the bedlam. Delegates were also yelling at the politicians on the dais who were shouting back. Trying to calm the crowd, Senator Ribicoff said off the cuff that if George McGovern was president, young people wouldn’t be beaten in the streets of Chicago. The city’s Mayor Daley took great offense to this and stood up, looked at the senator, and yelled something back at him. From the floor of the convention hall where I was standing, it sounded like he said, “Get that fucking kike out of here.” Whatever his exact words were, he continued to holler and pandemonium broke loose. Terry and I beat a hasty retreat. Having been invited to the Playboy Mansion, we decided to go because Terry just loved Hugh Hefner’s clubs and after our hectic two days we needed to unwind. We walked in and were given a tour of the downstairs bar where a glass underwater window showed bikini-clad Playboy Bunnies diving into the pool and wriggling to the surface to the delight of their male admirers. In the upstairs living room there were mostly men but I noticed a special table in a room off to the side with only busty young women sitting around having a late supper and giggling like schoolgirls. I thought this place was like a cross between a sorority and a whorehouse. Sure enough, Hefner was holding court wearing his trademark pajamas with an unlit pipe in his mouth, lamenting the fact that the city would not let the young people sleep in the park and were being beaten in the streets. Everybody nodded their heads in agreement. Terry and I had already joined this small circle and, looking around incredulously at all this space, I suggested that Hefner let them sleep there at the mansion. Everyone looked at me aghast and soon I was outside the ring of people looking at everybody’s back. Terry grabbed me by the arm and hustled me out of there. I guess I blew my big chance of becoming Miss August 1968. We slept late the next day and then went to join another protest march. When we arrived, there was a nice, neat, quiet line of young people, about four abreast and blocks long. There were organizers on the edges yelling, “Delegate coming through” and a guy in a wheelchair rolled by. There was one noisy protester who kept using foul language and peed in broad daylight, making an ass of himself. Terry recognized him as the guy who threw the brick at the police car the other night. He called him “a provocateur.” As we started to march forward, I noticed we were heading for an underpass in a very deserted place. I said, “I’ll see you back at the hotel” and left.

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When I got back to our room, I turned on the TV and there was no news of that incident. I was relieved when Terry returned unharmed. I don’t remember leaving Chicago the next morning or arriving back in New York, I guess I just blocked it all out. Terry just took random notes for the Esquire article while we were in Chicago and wrote the piece back in New York at the carriage house. Esquire, with whom Terry had a long successful relationship, was very enthused about his piece and kept his title for it, “Grooving in Chi.” They even used Terry on the cover (the photo with a young hippie lying on the ground with Terry and the others hovering over him was staged). Terry opened his article with the story of the beating of an inebriated African-American man by a gang of ten-year-olds armed with small sticks, which he witnessed from his taxi while riding to his hotel from the airport. It was a precursor to the violence yet to come. Because of the notoriety of his article, Terry was summoned back to Chicago to testify at the trial of his friend Abbie Hoffman, who with seven radicals (including Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale) was one of the organizers of the anti-war protest in Chicago. After they were arrested and went on trial, they were to become infamously known as “The Chicago Seven.” For some reason, Seale received a separate trial. Abbie was a merry prankster and a savvy user of the media to keep the anti-war movement in front of the cameras and in the newspapers. It seemed he had a million good ideas on how to upset the establishment, like throwing money down onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and levitating the Pentagon. Knowing Abbie, he was probably the one to devise the slogan “The whole world is watching” which was the mantra during the Chicago Democratic Convention protest. The Chicago Seven were defended by William Kunstler, who asked Terry to testify in court. Back we went to the Windy City for just one day. After we landed late in the evening, we were escorted to an apartment with no furniture and baby blue wall-to-wall carpeting. There were a few other people staying there including defendant Tom Hayden and we sacked out on the floor until morning. I can honestly say that I slept with Tom Hayden and others. Early the next day we were taken to the courthouse where we were met by Kunstler. He was a big guy and such a brilliant lawyer. He filled us in on what happened the day before. Despite the charges he was facing, Abbie seemed to be having a ball. The judge was also named Hoffman (no relation) but Abbie kept calling him “Dad.” Apparently the defendants all showed up in black robes and they wouldn’t remain seated but were running all over the courtroom. Abbie even leaped onto the defense table.

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While Terry gave his deposition blaming the FBI provocateur (the guy in the Notre Dame t-shirt) for starting the riot in Lincoln Park, no doubt prearranged by Mayor Daley, Kunstler asked me if I was willing to give one as well. He wanted to use us as material witnesses and have us testify about the police brutality we had witnessed at the time. I told him what I had experienced first hand in the park and how terrified I was of being hurt by the police. We sat in the courtroom for a short period waiting to be called to the witness stand but Kunstler decided for some unknown reason not to call on us. We then returned home. Terry’s article and other writings on the protest movement did receive flack from the people whose political views he supported but not necessarily their methods. David Amram, an active voice against the Vietnam War, concurred with Terry’s point of view: His political reporting was incredible especially when he wrote about the 1968 riots in Chicago. A lot of people were offended by that because they thought he was betraying egalitarian liberalism. A bunch of stoned out people, who just wanted to party, were throwing the country into the hands of right wing people for an indefinite period of time, even though they meant to do something else, which is what happened! Terry was able to see what was really happening—that a lot of the so-called youth leaders were a bunch of opportunistic philistines themselves, profiting from the agony of the Vietnam War. He was disgusted by that, and offended. What he wrote about that was amazing. He was poking fun at the organizers and college kids who had never seen a policeman and who had a deferment while the cop’s kid was in the war. That did not justify police over-reaction, but that was provoked in advance by the people who organized the protests. Terry saw that the anti-war movement was being taken over by publicity hounds [who] destroyed the whole validity of it, turning it into something that got right wingers elected—up until today. Terry could see that way back then. It’s amazing. A lot of things that he wrote about were shocking because they were so truthful. He held a mirror up to America. That’s what’s scary about good writers. His humor was so devastatingly accurate it was painful to a lot of people. Terry was not politically correct, he was correct period.

While we were in Chicago, Rip Torn had use of his and Terry’s boat, The Bay O Peeg. He was acting in the experimental film Maidstone directed by, written by, and starring Norman Mailer that was being shot on Gardiner’s Island and parts of the Hamptons. The movie was a flop but it is notorious because Norman bit Rip’s ear after Rip (in character, master actor that he is), surprisingly attacked him with a hammer, keeping in line with Norman’s story outline. The look on Rip’s face was so intense that Norman, thinking that his co-star had gone berserk, panicked and fought back, almost tearing Rip’s ear off as they rolled down a hill. After they were pulled apart, Norman and Rip quarreled all the way up a footpath with Norman accusing

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Rip of attacking him in front of his wife and children. Defending himself, Rip exclaimed, “I pulled the punch, man! I pulled the punch!” The crew kept the cameras rolling and followed them up the lane. After hearing about the incident, Terry’s pithy observation was that “obviously Norman forgot the obligation of the scene.” The following weekend was our turn with the boat. While Terry was scribbling away with his pencil working on some project, I went for tea and a swim with a lovely English woman who had the most beautiful sailboat docked at the end slip. She told me about the scandal of the previous weekend as we swam sidestroke around and around her boat. Apparently Rip showed up with a bevy of nubile nymphets and they took off in the boat heading for the film shoot on Gardiner’s Island. However, the boat never came back. It was ditched on a sandbar and the harbor master had to retrieve it. According to my friend, panties were found scattered around the cabin and on deck. After our swim I went back to the Bay O Peeg and curiously looked around. I didn’t discover any ladies underwear but I did find a small bag of pot, which I sat down and immediately smoked. We were the talk of the harbor for weeks thanks to Rip. Peter Matthiessen (Terry’s friend from the Paris Review) lived in the Hamptons and around this time took Terry, Rip, and me out on his boat. Without any warning, Rip stripped down to his underwear and dove off the side of the boat. He swam to an island off in the distance. Terry was astonished and exclaimed, “Did you see that?!” I drolly responded, “Who could hardly miss it?” Rip swam back, climbed in the boat, and shook the water off of him the way a dog does. Peter, an uptight upper classman who we later learned was a CIA agent and used the Paris Review as a cover while he lived in Europe, was appalled at Rip’s behavior and never invited us out again. When autumn came, the boat was put in dry dock for the winter. I was safe until next year. Fortunately for me, Terry’s interest in the boat faded. When we moved to the farm in Canaan in the early Seventies, we never saw it again though Terry’s son Nile would go out to the boat with Rip’s two sons. Geraldine Page was lucky as she never had to lay eyes on it. (But she once said to me, “You know, Gail, sometimes I imagine the boat as a giant yacht and other times as a little dinghy.”) Terry carried the title and insurance for the boat in his wallet and would misplace them at every opportunity, causing Rip to explode. Rip would give Terry his share of the storage fees and Terry would lose the check. The bills would pile up and they would eventually get a gigantic invoice from the harbor master. Rip was very nice about it and would chide Terry gently about what happened to the check. This went on for years. I never understood completely why we kept the boat for as long as we did. Growing

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up in Texas, I think Terry had a romantic notion about having a boat to sail the open seas though we never got past the breakwater. After we had met Brian Jones at Robert Fraser’s place the first time we were in London, Terry stayed friendly with him. I on the other hand had nothing in common with Brian though I respected his talent. We rarely spoke and only exchanged pleasantries. One warm November night when The Rolling Stones were in New York, we met them at the Hilton Hotel on Sixth Avenue. They had two entire floors, which were sealed off from the rest of the hotel. Due to throngs of teenage fans camped outside the hotel, security was tight and one had to go up the service elevator to get to their suites. Burly bodyguards patrolled the hallways. We soon found our way to Brian’s room and a convoy was organized to go to Terry’s favorite restaurant, Elaine’s on the Upper East Side. Taking the elevator to the basement parking garage, Terry, Brian, and I got into the back seat of a black sedan with a driver. We shot out of the garage like a bullet into a mass of screaming girls in front of the hotel. It seems the trick was to accelerate and speed out of the building into the traffic of Sixth Avenue with a deft left turn. The driver hit the gas to get through the mini-skirted mob but to my horror, one chubby girl managed to stick to the trunk. Oblivious to the danger, she kept hollering, “Brian, I love you!” The driver panicked and hit the gas as he maneuvered into the flow of traffic. Everything was moving by us quickly in the dark. I was terrified. Still exclaiming her undying devotion for Brian, the screaming girl was holding on and looking through the back windshield at her idol, unaware that she was about to slide off and possibly fall under the wheels of a speeding taxi or worse a bus. Brian had experienced this before and told the driver to slow down. He did and the girl slipped safely off the trunk of the car and onto the sidewalk. We arrived at Elaine’s and met up with some other friends. Elaine put us at a large table along the wall. Soon the second car, which must have had trouble getting out of the hotel’s basement, arrived with Charlie Watts, the drummer for the Stones. Unfortunately, Elaine’s was packed and there was no room for him at our table. I noticed a commotion near the door as a pissed-off Watts left in a huff. I had never met him before and was never around him but I heard that he liked jazz music. Decades later he played the Blue Note and I had planned to hear him play. The club inexplicably was charging a $25 entrance fee—an unprecedented move for the famous jazz club. My friend and I didn’t go in. I don’t know how he plays but Terry took Ringo Starr to a jazz club once. After listening for long while, Ringo said, “That’s the first thing I heard all night that I can do.”

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In my opinion, Brian Jones was the most accomplished musician in the Stones at the time. He had an interest in other kinds of music. I think he was responsible for bringing the sitar and classical concepts to the others, taking their music in another direction, and may have already been on the outs with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Despite Brian’s talent and intellectual curiosity, which was what drew him and Terry together, he had a tragic flaw: losing his temper and beating up women. His girlfriend Anita Pallenberg was on the receiving end of this abuse more than once and eventually had to be rescued by Keith, who whisked her to London from Morocco to get her away from an especially abusive Brian while they were on holiday. Brian had a country estate outside of London. It was being restored by local builders. Apparently, he was a swimmer of Olympic ability and had a pool on his property. The workers obviously saw a lot of expensive cars, famous people, beautiful women, and plenty of drugs. After Brian was found mysteriously drowned in his pool in June of 1969, the authorities claimed “death by misadventure.” However, the people who knew him at that time immediately suspected foul play and all signs allegedly pointed to the workers in Brian’s employ. In discussing Jones’ tragic, senseless death, Terry always felt that it was boisterous rough-housing that went terribly wrong and opined, “Perhaps the workers held Brian too long underwater and, panicking, fled from the scene?” By the time his friends found Brian and pulled him out of the pool, it was too late. As 1968 came to a close, the movie version of Candy was released. Much to his disappointment, Terry did not have any input into the making of it despite all the time he spent adapting his favorite novel into a screenplay during the time I first met him. While we were living at the beach house in Malibu, I was party to the confusing roundelay of selling the film rights to Candy. After the dust settled, Christian Marquand wound up with a short-term option to make a movie version of Candy. Christian, who had never directed a motion picture before, was a well-connected movie star in France and just appeared in the films Lord Jim (1965) and The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). Terry would never have fathomed that Christian would ever get the project green-lighted. However, once Christian convinced his friend Marlon Brando to star in it, he was able to get financing from a studio which was able to clear the rights in spite of the pirated editions. With Brando on board, Marquand then was able to get other big names such as Richard Burton, James Coburn, Walter Matthau, Ringo Starr, and John Huston to play cameo roles. Terry was astonished and delighted with this outcome as he’d been trying to get this project off the ground for years. Unfortunately, the studio rejected his screenplay because they wanted to cut out the hunchback scene that was in the original novel.

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In the book, Candy, strolling down Grove Street on the way to work, encounters a hunchback standing in front of her favorite tree on that quiet block in Greenwich Village. They begin chatting when he asks her for a quarter. Before long, she has invited the hunchback back to her apartment and they are having wild sex as he tries to stick his hump into her waiting “labias.” It was totally outrageous and so Terry. These scenes were very dear to Terry’s heart because it was the first he wrote for the book. Holding firm and refusing to delete them from the screenplay, he was fired and lost control over his property. Terry was replaced by Buck Henry who was riding high at the time due to the success of TV’s Get Smart. Terry was insulted that he was being replaced by a sitcom writer (not realizing that Henry had recently written the screenplay for The Graduate) and washed his hands of the movie and moved on to his next project. At the world premiere of Candy in New York, an apprehensive Terry and I found ourselves seated behind esteemed director Otto Preminger. As the movie played, I enjoyed the sight gag when Richard Burton as Candy’s professor got his scarf caught in the door while he was lecturing the class, but nothing else. Terry didn’t even like that and began to weep loudly seeing the travesty of what they did to his novel. I was taken aback and didn’t know what to do. I was hoping nobody else would hear him, especially Mr. Preminger. We scurried out of the theater before the lights came up. Terry was a man of few words and didn’t say much as we hit the nearest bar for a drink or two or three. Terry hated Candy and particularly disliked Swedish actress Ewa Aulin in the lead; he felt she was just too laidback and vapid. Candy was supposed to be full of energy and life, not a dull insipid drone. Terry envisioned precocious Hayley Mills playing the part when he was adapting the novel a few years prior. Though she was British, the string of films she made for Walt Disney beginning in 1960 with Pollyanna Americanized her in the eyes of the audience. Terry felt Hayley had the right combination of perkiness and wideeyed innocence to bring Candy to life on the big screen. At one point in 1965, she was even offered the role but her family, aghast, said no. There were other talented American actresses at that time who could have easily played the role such as Sharon Tate, Alexandra Hay, and perhaps even Tuesday Weld who, though a bit long in the tooth to play a teenager, still looked quite young. Worse than Aulin was Ringo Starr, who played her Mexican gardener. Who in their right mind thought the British long-haired Beatle could pull this off and convincingly play this part? A few weeks after the premiere, Terry received a letter from Buck Henry apologizing for ruining his novel. The

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ironic thing was that the hunchback scene for which Terry was fired was put back in the movie by Henry. In the mid–Seventies we went to visit Christian Marquand at his house in LA and Terry asked him point blank why he cast Ewa Aulin as Candy. Christian stated emphatically, “She was perfect. She was pink, white, and blue.” Responding, Terry exclaimed in frustration, “But Candy is red, white, and blue!”

7. All Aboard the London/ New York/Berkshires Express While at the carriage house during the early months of 1969, Terry was working on the screen adaptation of the book End of the Road. But he should have been in London where production had begun on The Magic Christian, whose script he co-authored with its director Joe McGrath (Terry had worked with McGrath on Casino Royale). Terry’s original novel, which was extremely well-received by the critics and the public, was a sociopolitical satire on American greed. Billionaire Sir Guy Grand spends his fortune trying to prove his theory that there is nothing too demeaning or repugnant that someone somewhere won’t do for money. In Sir Guy’s world, everybody has a price, and since he can afford it, he can pay to prove how distasteful people can be. Peter Sellers was a huge fan of The Magic Christian and thought the book was hilarious. As early as 1960, Peter wanted to make a movie of it and recommended it to director wannabe Joe McGrath, who at the time was working as an assistant on The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film that was co-directed by Peter and Richard Lester. McGrath was enthusiastic so Peter began to slowly develop the property in between acting assignments. He finally got studio backing not from any of the major studios but from Commonwealth United, an independent production company and distributor known for biker and other B-movies, and hired Terry to adapt his novel into a screenplay. Terry just loved Joe McGrath, who was fun and full of energy, so he had high hopes going into this project despite the fact that the producers Denis O’Dell and Anthony Unger demanded that Terry give Sir Guy Grand a son to make the movie more hip and less episodic. Terry was nonplussed by this as he usually took suggestions in good faith. If Sir Guy had to have a son, Terry reasoned that he would have “adopted” him so Terry created Youngman Grand, a wide-eyed, naïve, longhaired homeless hippie-type who lives in a park where he is befriended by Sir Guy, who takes him under his wing as his protégé. Since Terry was friends with The Beatles, it was suggested that he inquire if any of them would be interested in playing the role. Ringo Starr, who was fond of Terry and had 112

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appeared in Candy, readily accepted. But he must have been as confused as Terry trying to figure out why the character was deemed necessary. Terry owed his screenwriting career to Peter Sellers and truly appreciated Peter’s loyalty but deep down he felt that Peter was just not right for the role of Sir Guy and always imagined Robert Morley in the part due to his “absurdly pompous look.” But knowing it was Peter’s enthusiasm for the novel that was getting it produced as a movie and that you need a box office name to draw an audience into the theatres, Terry went along with it. Filming began on The Magic Christian in London without us as Terry kept postponing our departure despite the many phone calls begging him to come. He used the excuse that he had to finish up the script for End of the Road but I think his apprehension was due to the way Hollywood ruined his beloved Candy. Terry’s stalling contributed to his disappointment in the movie. Peter Sellers had the unfortunate habit of inviting friends that he made during social occasions to contribute script changes to whatever movie he was working on. The Magic Christian was no exception as he brought in British TV comedy scribes John Cleese and Graham Chapman (prior to their fame in Monty Python’s Flying Circus) to rewrite certain scenes since Terry was still in New York. Cleese and Chapman are no doubt extremely talented writers but they never read the book and the changes they made were in a slapstick vein, which were in complete contrast with Terry’s ideas. Once we finally arrived in London, we were put up in a hotel across the street from a beautiful English park, and Terry reported directly to the set where he immediately became appalled regarding the rewriting of certain scenes. What he had written seemed to be up for grabs as there didn’t seem to be much control by Joe McGrath, who was in complete awe of Peter Sellers. Terry spent a lot of time (as he put it) “doing damage control,” rescuing the screenplay from some newly added scenes. A few that he hated had already been shot; he was able to view the dailies, such as the hunting scene, where they were shooting at birds until they were charcoal. But the one in particular that he truly detested was the scene at the auction house. Due to Peter’s insistence and Joe and the producers’ hesitancy in arguing with him as to not upset their star, Chapman and Cleese created a segment where an auctioneer at Sotheby’s, just to outrage an art lover, slashed a Rembrandt. I think the writers just got carried away trying to be funny. But Terry knew his Sir Guy would never wantonly destroy beauty. Sir Guy was a kind chap into deflating pretentiousness, not causing destruction. The scene also personally infuriated Terry who as an art lover was aghast at such behavior. Peter finally listened to reason and agreed with Terry that the scene was tasteless. Promises were made to excise it but it still wound up in the final print.

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Another time an exasperated Terry came back to our room and said, “You’ll never believe this but the producers told me today that they signed Raquel Welch. I told them I had no scene for her. ‘Well, write one,’ they said.” And he did. That is what was so clever about Terry. He could accommodate producers’ whims without compromising his original work. Terry brilliantly snuck Raquel into the scenes on the SS Magic Christian. A peek into the engine room revealed a slave galley complete with a scantily clad Raquel as the fearsome slave mistress “The Priestess of the Whip,” urging a number of topless maidens to row faster by shouting, “In, out! In, out! In, out!” Raquel wasn’t the only star who desired to make a cameo. Laurence Harvey played a hammy actor starring in Hamlet who performs Shakespeare’s famous soliloquy “To be or not to be” in a gay striptease fashion as he ends the speech butt naked on the stage of an ancient East End theatre. I was in the audience watching them film Harvey’s scenes. He just loved playing this part so much and was so full of vigor. Never completely satisfied with his performance, he would rush back up the stairs where he started the monologue and demand that they do another take, frustrating Joe McGrath. Harvey refused to quit and it took the whole day to shoot this, including the nude scene. I can vouch that it was actually him naked and not a body double. He was such a great actor that each subsequent take got better and better as he continued to tweak his playing of the character. Just as funny was Yul Brynner, in a blonde wig and in full drag, singing “Mad About the Boy” in a sultry, breathy alto. As he crooned, he sauntered along the bar in the ocean liner’s lounge, passing uninterested patrons including Roman Polanski and me in cameos. When he reached the end of the bar, a lone man salivated at the gorgeous vision until Yul pulled off his wig, at which the flabbergasted man’s jaw dropped. Yul loved viewing his dailies so much that he and his wife missed their plane to Paris because he insisted on staying for the second showing in the afternoon, while Mrs. Brynner stewed in the anteroom. When he had time off from shooting, Terry and I spent a lot of time with Joe McGrath and his girlfriend Freddi, who also worked on the movie. Problem was, Joe was married and just had a baby. His wife made it a point to push the pram up and down the sidewalk in front of the flat where Joe was shacked up with his girlfriend. Nevertheless, I thought Joe was simply charming. It was the Swinging Sixties and I had no right to pass judgment considering the fact that my relationship with the still married Terry wasn’t much different. The last scene in The Magic Christian came straight out of Terry’s novel and entailed a huge amount of money being thrown into a vat of excrement by Sir Guy with greedy plutocrats fighting over the filth-covered bills. Great

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Britain didn’t print large enough denominations to make the scene work so they decided to shoot the climax in New York with real U.S. thousand dollar bills. Joe and Terry were insistent that it be shot under the Statue of Liberty. Before heading to the States, the cast and crew dined one last time together at a restaurant to celebrate the completion of London filming. Terry and I were there with Peter Sellers and his then-girlfriend Amanda; Ringo Starr and his wife Maureen; Joe McGrath and Freddi; and others. There were about thirty of us sitting at a giant round table. After the dinner plates were taken away and just before dessert was served, there was a lull in the conversation, and my voice boomed out that I had never been on an ocean cruise. Peter and Amanda, who was a lovely British girl, picked up on this and looked at each other as if light bulbs just went on in their heads. Unbeknownst to me, Amanda’s family owned Cunard Lines, a British shipping company whose fleet included the QE2 and QM2. Immediately Peter began talking up the idea of the cast and crew involved in the last scene sailing across the Atlantic rather than flying. I thought this was just pleasant drunken dinner chitchat but I was proved wrong. Within the next few days, Peter arranged to have everyone sail on the maiden voyage of the QE2. This included Terry and me; Peter and Amanda; Joe and Freddi; Ringo, his wife, their two children, and a nanny; The Beatles’ press agent Derek Taylor, his wife, five children, and a nanny; Denis O’Dell and his wife; and a few others. For some unknown reason Allen Klein, the head of The Beatles’ record label Apple, came along too. I was never able to figure out why. A BBC film crew was also on board to film our antics and to generate publicity for the film. Because of the celebrity factor (or perhaps because the cruise line knew this lot would be troublesome), we were housed separately from the rest of the passengers and had our own section of ornate staterooms with private first-class dining space called The Empire Room. The voyage should have been glorious but because the stabilizers malfunctioned, the ship rocked and rolled continuously across the vast ocean. Everybody, including some of the crew, was seasick except Peter and Terry who was happily drunk in the bar. I felt like I was at death’s door in our cabin but finally mustered some strength to join Terry in the lounge. In the hallway I bumped into a wild-eyed Peter carrying a great big jar of honey and a long-handled spoon. I told him how nauseous I felt and he said, “I have just the thing to help you” and he gave me a spoonful of honey—laced with hashish oil! But I immediately began to feel a bit better. Peter jauntily strolled the deck spooning out generous doses of honey to any ill passenger he encountered. I must say his special remedy did help me keep my meals down although it didn’t help keep me on my feet on that bucking bronco of a ship. Everybody was high in a kind of dream state the entire trip. I later learned

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that it was Terry who helped Peter score the hashish oil from Robert Fraser’s connection, Spanish Tony. Peter usually gets a bad rap from folks for his erratic behavior but I just saw the best side of him. I think around me Peter was still in character playing Sir Guy Grand. He was always polite and charming. I liked him a lot and I always had fun with him. And unlike with Brian Jones, I actually had nice conversations with Peter, who truly admired Terry. I guess to pass the time on these long voyages, some of the musically inclined crew members formed a combo and would jam in their quarters. This makeshift band had guitars and a drum set and played on a raised dais. One night they invited our group down for a jam session. Terry, Peter, Ringo, and the lot of us went to hear them play. Not knowing anything about rock music, I couldn’t tell if they were good or not. But everybody else seemed to be enjoying themselves. At one point, the band invited Ringo to sit in on drums. Flattered, he obliged and did the best he could under the circumstances. The long arduous voyage was finally coming to an end as this “Ship of Fools” sailed up the Hudson to dock in New York Harbor. Terry made an off-the-cuff comment to me betting that opportunistic Allen Klein would be the first passenger off the boat and sure enough he was as the flashbulbs from the eager photographers were popping like mad as we disembarked. Once we were settled back home, Terry got word that our ocean voyage had been so expensive there was no money left to finish the movie! Terry thought that was a lie and that the studio got cold feet regarding the scene. So do rational movie people stay in town and try to figure things out? Of course not! Soon cast and crew were off to Paradise Island in the Bahamas for two weeks of relaxation. Terry’s son accompanied us; I don’t recall how in the world Terry convinced his wife to allow Nile to come since I, a.k.a. “Miss Beach Ball,” was going but knowing Terry he probably didn’t tell her. We had a wonderful time. While Terry continued working on the script for End of the Road, I took it upon myself to teach city slicker Nile how to swim. The poor boy was terrified of the water after a previous attempt by Terry failed miserably. His method was the macho “throw-the-kid-in-and-see-if-he-can-float” routine. We would wade out into the beautiful crystal blue Caribbean and dunk ourselves under the sea to feed the multi-colored fish with breakfast rolls we snatched from the hotel’s dining room. This helped Nile get used to having his whole body submerged in water. I would alternate this with wading in the hotel’s pool to switch the focus for the boy when he got uptight in the ocean. It was a trick I later applied to students when I was teaching ballet: shifting their concentration from one dance exercise to another. By the end

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of the trip, I had Nile swimming but completely underwater as I wasn’t able to teach him to swim above. We returned to New York and the British contingent went back to England. Purportedly, Peter put up the money to complete the movie and was eventually reimbursed by Commonwealth United. A proper sewage pit on the South Bank of London was found to install that huge vat filled with a mud concoction to represent feces and counterfeit $1,000 bills in lieu of the real deal. As I began unpacking from our trip, Terry once again dropped a bombshell on me. He told me to stop since the landlord raised our rent on the carriage house to a then whopping $800 a month and we could not afford it as he was also paying for the home of his wife and child. Well, because of his financial mess, Terry announced to me, “We’re moving to the farm!” I was taken aback. I liked visiting the Connecticut house on the weekends as we had been doing but I wasn’t sure I could live there fulltime, being such an urbanite. I really didn’t have much time to dwell on it because we moved within weeks. At the time, the fact that the deed to the farm was in Terry and his wife’s name didn’t occur to me, or the problems that would arise. If I had been shrewder and if Terry would have been the type to address these business issues head on, all the troubles that I had after his passing might not have occurred. After filming was completed on The Magic Christian, Terry had no further input into the movie and left it in the hands of Joe McGrath and the film editors. We saw the final cut together for the first time in New York when it premiered in December of 1969. I found the individual scenes to be hysterically funny but the editing seemed too choppy. Terry was tight-lipped as usual but I just sensed he was brokenhearted though he didn’t sob in the theatre. He knew the movie was in trouble from the beginning so I am sure he was prepared. Someone once came up to Terry and told him that The Magic Christian was his favorite novel and Terry replied, “It’s my favorite too” so I know he found the film version a devastating disappointment. But never one to dwell on past failures, or successes for that matter, Terry was on to his next movie, End of the Road. Though we had plans to move into the farm, Terry’s wife had rented it out for the summer. He didn’t check first because he didn’t like to talk to her. Again his habit of avoiding matters got us into trouble. Scrambling for a place to live as we had not renewed our lease on the carriage house, we sublet a small apartment on Horatio Street and Greenwich Avenue. It was a reprieve for me as Terry was determined, no matter how far the farm was from the city, to continue being a part of George Plimpton’s literary party crowd, which he loved. Terry did some of his best writing in our car so the driving was always left up to me.

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David Amram was the piano player at Plimpton’s soirees and was attending them long before I came along. According to David, the other Texas authors looked up to Terry as a hero and legend: He was one of the first Texas writers and had actually written what life was about in those times. Not like an anthropologist but rather like Dostoyevsky writing about the Russian people. Terry had that same ability to produce wonderful literature. All those Texans at Plimpton’s realized that they didn’t have to have a British accent or go to Harvard or Yale in order to be a good writer. They could come from anywhere and create art or literature.

Terry also influenced David to play his music in a bar even though most of his peers at the New York Philharmonic thought it would be beneath its conductor. Of course, Terry took it a step further and suggested that David form a “nightmare band” consisting of one-time jailed musicians. Terry even concocted a story around it of this upright conductor trying to get these downtrodden and drug-addicted guys to play their instruments before passing out at a special concert to be attended by maestro Leonard Bernstein. David was also heavily involved in protesting the Vietnam War, which was still raging. Terry accompanied him to a meeting about organizing a prayer march in Washington, D.C., which Terry wound up not attending. A bunch of middle-aged guys in suits and ties were going to gather to pray in the halls of Congress, where they were supposed to get arrested. Terry loathed not only the arms dealers profiting from the war but also greedy people who with their anti-war records and fashions were making a fast buck off the peace movement. It had become as much of an industry as the war. Terry felt neither had any sympathy for the Vietnamese or the poor Americans sacrificing their lives. This protest was to bring awareness to both. David Amram recalls, When I told Terry that I was going to get arrested to make a statement, he remarked, “Don’t do it because that’s what they want.” I questioned what he meant. He explained that the extreme militaristic people would like the American public to feel that anyone who was an artist or intellectual was a no-good bum who belonged in jail, and the people who were promoting themselves off the agony of the Vietnamese and the American soldiers would also get some attention by forcing the government to do something that they didn’t want to do, and in effect it wasn’t effective. At the march we were trying to represent a responsible view of saying everyone should get together and sit down at the table to stop the killing of each other, which was going on indefinitely. It wasn’t anti–American, it was anticontinual murder, and there were some really terrific people there. Then some celebrities arrived that weren’t at any of the prayer meetings, trailed by TV cameras. They began screaming “Stop the war” and as soon as they departed, the cameras disappeared. I had given my word to these people so I was jailed along with a number of others. In my holding cell was Joseph Papp [the

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founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival] who I had worked with a few times. He spent the next four hours telling me about the upcoming plays that he was producing. I thought to myself, “I got to get out of here” so I made a few calls and was released on bail. Outside I saw all these famous people smiling for the cameras. After I got back to New York, I said to Terry, “You were right as usual. They [the celebrities] didn’t come to the meetings, and they didn’t even go to jail. What were they there for?” He replied, “Exposure.” I said, “Oh.” He saw what it was really about, not what it was supposed to be. Terry always had a sophisticated view of things.

Though I didn’t care for most of Terry’s friends at Plimpton’s save for David Amram and very few others, I liked Max Raab, who had money due to his very successful clothing line and was desperate to work with Terry. Max told him to find a property and he would finance the movie. Terry had just read the novel The End of the Road by John Barth, which was published in 1957. It was a bizarre tale about a depressed college graduate named Jacob Horner who after being found catatonic on a railway platform by Doctor D is taken to his clinic, “The Farm.” Under the care of the unorthodox psychiatrist who specializes in awakening his patients from a state of catatonia, the young man is convinced to “do his own thing.” Released, Jacob takes a job as an English professor in a small town college where he has an affair with the abused wife of an arrogant colleague, which leads to tragedy. I think what drew Terry to Barth’s book was that it was a harsh social satire, which is what he loved to write most, and that he knew the book was a hit with college students because of its anti-establishment viewpoint even though the novel had a very Fifties feel to it. Terry thought End of the Road would be a great project to work on with his long-time friend Aram Avakian. Terry met Aram (who everybody called Al) when he was living in Paris. Terry told me that he was sitting at an outdoor café when a military precision band paraded by. In the distance he noticed a stoned guy wearing sunglasses who was not part of the band, marching in perfect time with them as he weaved in and out of the line. Terry was so impressed that he had to meet him and they hit it off. When they both moved to Greenwich Village and needed money, Al’s brother George Avakian, who headed the Jazz Division at Columbia Records, would hire them to write the liner notes for the label’s latest jazz records. I first met Al at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles in 1964. Al and Terry were the same physical type—large, stocky and bear-like—and both were funny, hip guys. Being around them, I felt like I was in the presence of brilliance and that if they set their minds to it they could conquer the world. Terry and Al always wanted to collaborate so when End of the Road came Terry’s way he knew that it would be a perfect movie for them. Al read the novel and agreed with Terry. The only problem was that when they went to

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option the book, they discovered the rights were purchased by a guy named Dennis McGuire. Offers were made to him to sell the option but he refused. The producers then had to give McGuire a writing credit though he contributed absolutely nothing to the screenplay that Terry and Al began working on. Though he had not much experience directing, it was decided that Al would be the director. He was an accomplished film editor known for such movies as The Miracle Worker, Lilith, Mickey One, and You’re a Big Boy Now. He was working as a director on the forgotten children’s movie Lad: A Dog in 1962 when he got fired due to “creative differences.” In this poor man’s Lassie rip-off, our hero was supposed to tie the knot with a sophisticated bitch at a doggie wedding in the film’s finale. Al thought Lad, in keeping with his character, was more apt to run off with a poor mutt instead, bucking tradition. The studio did not appreciate Al’s ending and he was out of a job. His sense of satire certainly was a perfect match with Terry’s. He hadn’t directed since but Terry and Max Raab had confidence in his talents. Since this was an independent production, filmed as far from the luxurious back lots of Hollywood as can be, they needed to find a place to film. Terry and Al scouted locations in the Northeast and found a wonderful vacant button factory in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to use as a soundstage. Conveniently, it was only eleven miles away from Terry’s farm in East Canaan. The town itself was virtually abandoned when the factory, which was the population’s livelihood, closed down. Interiors were to be shot on built sets in the factory and exteriors in the beautiful surrounding countryside. A director of photography was needed to capture the Berkshire setting but unfortunately the budget would not allow them to hire a Hollywood pro. Someone came up with the idea to employ an up-and-coming cinematographer from the advertising world. Terry and Al watched reels and reels of TV commercials and one guy’s work in particular stood out. His name was Gordon Willis and, having aspirations to move to film work, he accepted their offer to shoot End of the Road. Supremely talented, Gordon would go on to shoot the three Godfather movies, All the President’s Men, and a number of Woody Allen movies including Annie Hall, Manhattan, Zelig, Pennies from Heaven, Broadway Danny Rose, and The Purple Rose of Cairo. Perhaps due to the limited budget and in keeping with the book’s antiestablishment tone, it was decided that the actors should be New York stage actors rather than the typical Hollywood studio talent. Stacy Keach was cast as Jacob Horner despite the fact that he would have to shoot the movie by day and star on Broadway at night in Indians where he was playing Buffalo Bill. His paramour was played by Al’s then wife Dorothy Tristan, a former

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fashion model who at one time toured in a production of Marat/Sade. Terry remembered James Earl Jones from working with him on Dr. Strangelove and, impressed with his acting talent, offered him the role of “Doctor D.” Terry pushed for Grayson Hall to be cast as the older English teacher whom Jacob picks up on the beach. Terry didn’t know her from her Academy Award–nominated performance in The Night of the Iguana but for her role as Dr. Julia Hoffman on his favorite soap opera Dark Shadows, which was a huge hit at this time. Father and son bonded over their mutual love for this macabre serial and Terry even arranged a visit to the set one day. A thrilled Nile got to meet his favorite actor Jonathan Frid who starred as the show’s reluctant vampire, Barnabas Collins, and left with an autographed photo of him. Since the farm was still rented, Terry and I needed to find a place to stay during the shoot. We joined the crew at the Egremont Inn, a pre–Revolutionary inn on the road to Boston. It was run by a middle-aged, tall blonde woman named Mrs. Durphy, an eccentric who had closed the inn and lived there alone. Somehow someone convinced her to let us stay there. She was certainly a character who spoke loudly and had an infectious, raucous laugh. The inn was quite big with twenty guest rooms and was able to house the entire crew. Unfortunately for them, the leading actors were put up elsewhere as were Al and Dorothy, who missed out on a lot of fun. Back at the inn after a hard day’s shoot, the booze would be flowing from the hotel’s mini-bar and old lady Durphy would be holding court, enjoying the company immensely. One evening she decided to make classic New England clam chowder for everyone staying there. She opened the doors to the closed kitchen, which was left in a pristine state. I followed her in and watched her make the soup. It was incredibly delicious and was enjoyed by all. Thanks to her recipe, I now know how to make perfect clam chowder, if I do say so myself. Terry of course hit it off with Mrs. Durphy because she had that largerthan-life personality that he so loved. One night I was trying to get some much-needed sleep when I was suddenly awakened by the sounds of wild laughter and blasting rock music, which I realized was the Beatles after I shook the cobwebs out of my head. Deeply perturbed and cranky, I left my room to complain to the management when halfway down the staircase I saw that the racket was being made by the management herself, Mrs. Durphy, and Terry, who were sitting on a plaid couch with drinks in hand, having a grand old time. Smiling bemusedly, I turned around and crept back up the stairs, not wanting to break up their private party. Back in my bed I laid awake waiting for the noise to die down, which eventually it did. As shooting continued, Terry became more and more impressed with

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Stacy Keach. Every night Keach had a car take him back to New York City so he could make the curtain on his show and would apply his makeup during the drive. After the play finished he would be driven back to the movie location. He was the consummate professional, always knowing his lines and never arriving on the set late. Since Keach was playing a college professor, the plan was to cast teenagers from the local high school as his students. Word had gotten around the conservative town that End of the Road was going to be a “dirty movie.” Where they got this notion is beyond me. Didn’t they ever see a guy having simulated sex with a chicken on camera? Worried parents refused to let their children participate so we had to scramble to fill the classroom seats with anybody who could pass for an eighteen-year-old. I was one of the recruits, even though I was almost thirty, along with the script girl and some of the crew. My whole part as “Miss Gibson” consisted of me with my hair in pigtails sitting in the back of the classroom, rolling a joint at my desk. Just to set the record straight, it was oregano and unfortunately not marijuana. I got caught by the teacher who reprimanded me. I just stared at him with that typical teenage “whatever” look and when class was dismissed I sat there until all my classmates left and then got up while Keach just looked at me quizzically. At this point in my “career” I was using the stage name of Gail Gibson so for years and years nobody ever knew that I appeared in it. The cast was having so much fun—controlled fun—with their roles, especially James Earl Jones who was just marvelous. Actors loved Terry’s dialogue and would ask for one more take just so they could recite the lines again. Terry and Avakian even got in on the act and could be seen in the distance diving under women’s petticoats on the grassy knoll of “The Farm.” I really liked Dorothy Tristan but she was very busy learning her lines and having an affair with one of the actors so we didn’t spend much time with her. Shortly after the movie wrapped she invited me to the Actor’s Studio to watch my hero Jerome Robbins teaching the Japanese tea ceremony to a group of students. It was a sweet gesture but for some reason I didn’t accept the invite. I truly regret it to this day. Decades later while I was living in the great city of Chicago, mutual friends took me to Dorothy’s peach farm. She had long retired from acting and was now a screenwriter and married to director John Hancock. She confessed to me about how wild she was during the time of End of the Road and lamented the mistakes she made during that period. During the filming, Max Raab and Steve Keston, the producers, commissioned a making-of documentary. I can’t recall who actually shot it but Max screened it along with End of the Road at a private screening of the movie in the Berkshires. After shooting wrapped, Terry and I moved into a chalet at the bottom

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of Catamount, a ski slope in Massachusetts, because the farmhouse in East Canaan was still occupied by summer renters. We were there for a couple of weeks and during this time I don’t recall Terry having anything to do with End of the Road post-production. I know he had a falling out with Al Avakian that ended their long friendship but I never asked Terry what it was about. I was surprised by this since throughout the shoot I never noticed any animosity between these two easygoing guys. Terry of course didn’t volunteer any information and as usual I didn’t ask because I knew he didn’t like talking about negative things. When you refuse to confront unpleasant situations, it makes life difficult because you cannot solve a problem. I never got forceful with Terry over these matters because I didn’t want to turn into a nag like many wives do. But looking back, there were some instances where I should have stepped in and pushed him to face the problem head on. Regarding Terry and Al, I think sometimes when friends want to work together for a long time and they finally get the opportunity, it ruins the relationship. I think that was the case here. End of the Road opens with a flashing montage of images including those of student protests at Swarthmore University, Vietnam War atrocities, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy accompanied by Billie Holiday’s bluesy torch song “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me.” The audience knows right from the get-go that this film is going to be a vicious assault on the establishment as the story begins with Stacy Keach’s graduating college student (Keach) leaving the halls of academia only to wind up in a catatonic state on a railroad platform. Discovered by James Earl Jones’ experimental doctor, he is taken to his “Farm” where the good doctor instills a purpose into the disheartened student, telling him to reach for his dream of teaching. Landing a job at the local university, Keach has an affair with Dorothy Tristan, the wife of his colleague Harris Yulin, which leads to an abortion and a tragic death. The movie features an upbeat, jazzy musical score supervised by George Avakian, which I felt was a bit out of place for a late Sixties counterculture movie. I liked the film but knew it would not be a commercial hit. Like most of Terry’s movies, it had something to offend everyone. Terry thought that End of the Road was great. He couldn’t figure out why it was slapped with an “X” rating. This hurt the movie and severely restricted its distribution despite some rave reviews from the critics. End of the Road disappeared from theaters almost in an instant. I felt badly considering that I saw all the hard work and dedication from the cast and crew go into it but that happens a lot in the film industry. Terry was disappointed of course but took the film’s failure in stride. He began working on his next script, never suspecting that it would be almost twenty years until one of his screenplays next made it to the big screen.

8. Move Over, Eva Gabor— Farm Living Is the Life for Me In early August 1969, we finally were able to move into the Colonialstyle farmhouse in East Canaan, Connecticut. It was a glorious wooden house built in 1752 with a long driveway bordered by towering oak trees leading up to it. Terry and his wife purchased it in 1960. Terry told me that at the time he was not in the market to become a home owner and was just accompanying his friend, bandleader Artie Shaw, who was seeking a weekend home in the Berkshire Mountains that had to have a stream for trout fishing on the property. They hooked up with a real estate agent who showed them this house but it was not grand enough for Artie. But Terry fell in love with it immediately. He asked the agent how much cash it would take to make a deal. The agent said he could do it for $8,000. Terry turned to Artie and asked, “Can you lend me $8,000?” Artie got so mad that he bought the house himself. Shortly after the sale went through, he found a home that he liked better and sold the other house to Terry. The farm was magical, tucked away in a cul-de-sac after the river changed course. Before Artie bought it, it had been owned by one prominent family that was active in the settling of the U.S. and passed down from generation to generation for over 200 years. It was a classic big white Colonial, much larger than the others surrounding it. Sitting on twenty-nine acres, it had a pond, orchard, barn, and out buildings. It fitted Terry’s idea of being the “Gentleman Farmer.” It also had an old overgrown graveyard with forty-seven graves and a giant dead oak tree in the center. One time Rip Torn went out to clean up the graveyard and when he came in the kitchen door his hair was standing straight up. He looked dazed, and said quietly, “I don’t think they minded me too much.” A babbling stream flowed by the front door so one could easily step outside to cast a line for trout fishing. The interior of the huge Colonial was simply grand. There were far too many rooms for Terry and me but we managed to fill up each and every one with beautiful knick-knacks and antique furniture that we had gleaned from yard sales and auctions over a thirty-year period. In the dining room we hung a beautiful painting given to me by Larry Rivers from his playing card 124

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Top: The farm house in Canaan, covered in deep snow. Above: The vast property included a private cemetery.

series. It was his interpretation of the Queen of Clubs. The floorboards were two feet wide apiece but had shrunk over time, leaving big cracks between them. During our first week at the farm, I found a bicycle left by the summer tenants and tried to ride it into the village one beautiful sunny morning. The

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trouble was, I never learned how to ride a bike and wound up walking it all the way there and back. It was a glorious day so I didn’t mind the long stroll in the least. I stopped at a drugstore to buy the daily newspaper where I read in large black headlines, “Sharon Tate and 5 Others Murdered.” I was shocked. I was afraid to take it home and show Terry because I knew how disturbed he would be. Terry was friendly with Sharon and another victim, Jay Sebring, who was his barber out in Hollywood. I sheepishly handed him the newspaper when I got home. He took one look at the headline and went into his office, closing the door behind him. I knew the tragic story depressed him so. Not wanting to let me see his sorrow, he didn’t emerge from the room until many hours later. Once word got around that a famous writer had moved into town, the local book store owner stocked his shelves with Terry’s works including the notorious Candy. The book was still deemed “obscene” in certain parts of the country including Connecticut. The proprietor was warned that Candy would be seized and he arrested if he continued selling them. The sheriff from the local precinct was on watch under orders from the F.B.I. Terry was both amused and astonished by this. The F.B.I. even questioned a local acquaintance about Terry. The guy was smart and set up an old reel-to-reel tape recorder in a potted plant, and turned it on. As the F.B.I. men began questioning him, the tape recorder began squeaking as the tape went around and around. The guy was sure it would give him away but it didn’t. Terry used to say, “All people who were cops have criminal minds so they are drawn to law enforcement. They need that instinct to function in their jobs. But like criminals, they aren’t too smart, and screw up.” Terry liked the idea of a working farm and proceeded to settle down as a “Gentleman Farmer.” But he was the “Gentleman” and I became the “Farmer.” He first bought five geese. They wandered around hissing and pecking at everyone. Then he decided to get some chickens. They also had the run of the place. There was an egg hunt every morning. If you could find them, they were delicious. Then some Bantam roosters came along. They do not wait for the sun to start crowing. A Guinea hen was added. It ran around screaming at the top of its lungs. Needless to say, it was the TV show Green Acres come to life with me as Eva Gabor but without the accent, fabulous wardrobe, and expensive jewelry. Nor did I have an “Eb” to help me around the farm as I had to do all the work by my lonesome. Terry was usually too busy writing to pitch in and help. One day, Terry came home with “three pigs in a poke” (a bag)—two brothers and a female dubbed “Tiny Sow”—and let them loose in a pen. She got her name when at the farm where he purchased her, Terry said, point-

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ing, “I want that one.” “Get the tiny sow,” the farmer shouted. She was black from her middle to her backside, and pink in front. She was so sweet and I could swear she would smile at me when I would check on her. I’d find Tiny Sow and the two males curled up like sausages, sound asleep. They ate the rotten pears and apples that fell from trees in our orchard. We eventually called the butcher who returned Terry had a little lamb. the two males as pork loins and chops, and when cooked they smelled of fruit. Tiny Sow, however, lived for many years in solitary splendor. Terry built her a swimming pool out of an old bathtub, and a warm, cozy den for the winter.

One of the rare times Terry tried to live up to his ideal of being “a Gentleman Farmer.”

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Tiny Sow was sent to be bred once but she came home still a virgin. Sometimes I was alone with her in the dead of winter with temperatures below zero. I wanted to invite her into the house but the den Terry constructed for her lined with straw kept her comfortable and she pretty much had everything she needed—plus room service! I would bring her dinner, greens bought at the grocer, in my big orange French pot, trudging back and forth to the house, sometimes in six-foot snow drifts. We had deep snow in those days. The frigid weather would sometimes last ten days or more. Alone in the mountains during those freezing days (often while Terry was in balmy LA working on a project), I would begin to feel as if I had a high temperature. I would see nobody for days except Tiny Sow. I had lived and worked in Toronto, Montreal, Hollywood and New York meeting fabulous people and now here I was stuck in the middle of nowhere bonding with a pig! Next Terry purchased three sheep with black faces. They were never shorn, and over the years their wool grew to a tremendous length, trailing behind them through the old orchard. From my bedroom window I would watch them during the cold long winters trudging through the snow. Terry was busy writing and would forget Farm living is the life for me!

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to feed everyone—some Gentleman Farmer he turned out to be—so that responsibility fell to me. Never in a million years would I have imagined that I would end up running a farm. It was the biggest challenge of my life and I surprisingly loved it! I read “How-to” books about farming, livestock, and gardening. First I tried “Mulch Queen” Ruth Stout’s method of gardening. She was a grand British woman who authored Gardening Without Work amongst other books. Her idea was to lay eight inches of mulch (I used hay) across the entire garden and then open channels in it to plant the vegetables. I chose this technique because it sounded easy and not so time-consuming. After you planted, all you had to do was brush the mulch off the seedlings. I put down a good two feet of hay. It was a big garden so after I was finished I sat down in the middle of it and lit a joint to celebrate my accomplishment. Looking around at all this dry hay, it occurred to me that this might not be such a good idea as one fallen ember could have me go up in flames like St. Joan of Arc so I put it out. Winters were the toughest part of living on a farm. When everything was frozen, I would have to bring water to the sheep each morning by hauling big buckets of water through snow drifts. One winter weekend, Rip Torn and his family stayed over. I was doing my early morning chores and Rip, in full-blown paranoia, was watching me suspiciously from the kitchen window. When I got into the house, he breathed a sigh of relief and said, “Phew, I thought that was some guy out there.”

A little something extra helped me get through those long cold New England winter nights.

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Try driving up this snowy driveway stoned.

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Terry had one rule at the farm and it had nothing to do with livestock or gardening. He’d say to me, “You can’t argue about anything more than eighteen hours old.” That left all my gripes untouchable! Once when Terry and I were quibbling, Rip overheard me quote an apt line from a play. He scolded me firmly and said, “You’re not allowed to use lines from plays in domestic arguments.” Sometimes during the height of the brutally cold snowy winters, Terry and I would be isolated from our friends and only have each other for company. Nights were especially long, dark, and stormy. The house was like an ice box. Before sundown I would gather twigs and branches from the floor of the woods for kindling. Terry would carry in logs covered in thick ice, which sometimes still hadn’t melted by morning. He was drinking with a vengeance. I could see mad creative thoughts swirling around in his head— his eyes glazed and distraught. It was right out of Stephen King’s The Shining but without the murderous impulses—I think. During these long stretches of cold, Terry mostly spent his time writing but he was a masterful storyteller and would beguile and entertain me with tales from his childhood, his adventures living in Paris and Greenwich Village or his time working on Dr. Strangelove. Many of these stories I heard numerous times over a thirty-year period. While speaking of his boyhood experiences, Terry said that he and a friend would walk along a train trestle and play chicken, and when they heard the train coming they would dive off. Terry jumped one day to find his friend didn’t make it. Another time he and a pal were playing in a culvert when it suddenly filled up with water and they were swept downstream. Terry grabbed a low branch and hung on until some adults rescued them. He never liked water after that. As a dopey adolescent, Terry would ask a girl, “Do you have a cold?” “No, why?” she’d reply. He’d respond, “Well, your chest seems swollen.” Then he’d poke the poor lass’ chest. Another “seduction technique” was to carry small library scissors with rounded points. He’d spike the girl’s fruit punch with rum or gin and, when she was sufficiently drunk, whisk her off to a secluded spot. There he’d snip the crotch of her panties and get “wet finger.” Those were the days when boys were always trying to get to first base, then second base and then third base. As Terry got older he would go across the tracks to the black part of town to listen to music. There was a hooker there who would try to entice him into having sex by exclaiming, “It’s black on the outside, but it’s red in the goodie!” Terry was eighteen and World War II was raging when he dropped out of Southern Methodist University and enlisted in the army. Before he shipped out on the Queen Mary, he spent many a night at G.I. clubs where service-

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men came to eat, drink, and dance with beautiful girls. Terry was sent to England, then landed at Omaha Beach on that infamous day in history and fought his way inland. He and a buddy were sharing a foxhole when his friend defiantly told him that he wasn’t going to die. He stood up and was blown away. A stunned and devastated Terry continued fighting until he was wounded when a fieldstone wall collapsed on him. He was shipped to a hospital in London where he recovered and spent his first English Christmas. He was astonished at the cool of the British people going about their business while buzz bombs were flying overhead. He said as long as you could hear them you were safe, but when the sound cut out that’s when they would explode. Terry used to dream of touring the Greek Islands on a ship, waking up to the beautiful clear sunny skies and crystal blue Mediterranean Sea in his Deck Class cabin with Arabs making coffee in small brass pots. He finally got his chance and traveled with a gorgeous teacher and choir member who kept breaking out in song, practicing her part in Borodin’s Prince Igor. Years later every time that music played on our car radio, which was often, I noticed he got a dreamy look on his face. Due to Jean Stein, Terry got the chance to meet one of his literary heroes, William Faulkner. Jean was one of the richest women in the U.S., being the daughter of Dr. Jules Stein, the founder of the Music Corporation of America (MCA), originally a music booking agency that expanded into TV and film production and then became part of Universal Pictures. She had known Terry for many years beginning back in the Fifties during his Greenwich Village days. Jean was in competition for him with others, showering the hip writer with expensive gifts and inviting him to soirees to meet celebrities of the literary world. Terry said he chose the woman he married over Jean because “she had a quiet place for me to write. I thought Jean would be too social and demanding of my time.” Jean invited Terry to dinner uptown to meet the esteemed Faulkner, whom she was dating. She wanted to “steam Faulkner,” as Terry explained. Just before Terry left his apartment in Greenwich Village, he spent some time with his friend, acclaimed African-American author James Baldwin, who told him a racist joke about these two black guys talking. One said to the other, “I’m going to get me a white Cadillac, a white suit, and some white pussy.” The other guy said, “I’m going to get me a black Cadillac, a black suit, and I’m going to watch them hang your black ass.” This joke was on Terry’s mind all the way uptown on the subway. Arriving at Jean’s apartment, he knocked on the door and was let in by Faulkner. He said, “Miss Jean is in her toilette and will be right down.” He then offered Terry a drink as they headed toward the kitchen. He poured two

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glasses of whisky and an awed Terry, who was shy to begin with, was extremely nervous to be around the great writer and became tongued-tied. Not knowing what to say, he started to tell the joke. Halfway through he was sorry that he had begun, and was wondering how it was going to be taken. He explained that he had just heard it from a friend in the Village who happened to be black. Faulkner laughed and said, “As long as they maintain their sense of humor, they will endure.” During dinner, Terry was seated adjacent to Faulkner. Terry noticed that the writer wasn’t eating his escargot and asked him why. Faulkner replied, “Terry, they remind me of old pessaries.” When the meal was finished, after-dinner drinks were served. Faulkner said to Terry, “I see we are drinking brandy while the others are sipping wine. What is that saying, ‘brandy for heroes, wine for gentlemen, and sherry for women.’ Will you toast with me?” Terry’s favorite Dr. Strangelove story involved actor Slim Pickens, who as the gung-ho B-52 pilot famously rode the bomb to his death at the end of the movie. Peter Sellers was supposed to play this role too as well as Dr. Strangelove, the RAF soldier, and the American president. Terry made a tape of a Texas drawl for Peter, who went around with giant earphones to master the accent. But he sprained his ankle and could not do the physical climbing down the ladder to the bomb bay doors. Stanley Kubrick felt that they had to get a real cowboy to replace him. He was out of touch with the U.S. because he had lived abroad for so long. He asked Terry to recommend someone. Terry mentioned Dan Blocker, who played Hoss on TV’s Bonanza. He was offered the role but his agent turned it down. Kubrick then remembered Slim Pickens from One-Eyed Jacks, which he directed for a short time, before being replaced by its producer and star Marlon Brando. Slim was a former rodeo rider with a distinct Texas-Oklahoma accent though he was born and raised in California. The husky, round-faced actor showed up at the London studio about eleven-thirty in the morning in his normal clothes, cowboy boots and a Stetson. No one could understand a word he said, so an assistant director was summoned to fetch Terry who spoke “Texan.” Terry asked Slim if it was too early for a drink, and he replied that it was never too early, so Terry poured two water glasses full of Wild Turkey, which had been bought for just such an occasion. Terry then asked how his accommodations were, and Slim answered, “Hell, it doesn’t take much to make me happy—a pair of loose-fitting shoes, a little tight pussy, and a warm place to sheeeit.” At this the young assistant director blanched and fled the office. Terry took Slim over to the set and left him alone for a few minutes so he (Terry) could discuss a scene with Kubrick. While they were talking,

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Kubrick said to Terry, “Look, there’s James Earl Jones on a collision course with Slim. You better go over and introduce them.” As Terry approached them, Jones asked Pickens what it was like to work with Marlon Brando. According to Terry, Slim replied, “Well, I worked with Marlon Brando for six months, and in that time I never saw him do one thing that wasn’t all man and all white.” Terry just froze but James Earl Jones knew the type, and didn’t crack. The Berkshires was home to a number of famous folk from the literary world but we didn’t socialize with many of them. The one writer Terry liked immensely was Brendan Gill who wrote for The New Yorker and was an author of many books including Here at The New Yorker and Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright. His home was on Toby Pond, a small, private, crystal clear lake with bath houses all around. Every summer we would gather at his dock to eat, drink and swim all day. Brendan, in his seventies at the time, had a big family and I never did manage to keep the names of his children straight. They were Irish Catholic, and his beautiful, young-looking wife Anne was the mother of them all. Terry always enjoyed spending time with the Gills and they were the only neighbors for a long time that we socialized with. Brendan’s daughter Rosemary Gill lived there year round, in an old house that was crumbling with neglect. Terry and I would go there for dinner. Rosemary would sing Irish fighting songs at the top of her lungs, which would carry for miles on those cold clear nights, with snow piled high everywhere. We would creep home totally drunk through the back roads. Over the years, as I watched the Gill children wed, I realized that you had to be able to sing to marry into that family. Brendan’s next door neighbor was poet and publisher James Laughlin, who founded New Directions Publishers. He would swim over to Brendan’s dock side stroke and would haul himself out of the water like a giant whale. Terry and he would sit for hours in rapt conversation with one stiff drink after another. When it was time to depart, Laughlin would walk home through a path in the pine trees. Most of our time at the farm found Terry scribbling away on a new script. He saved every single sheet of paper that he wrote on so of course his office was in disarray. He hired a local nineteen-year-old named Priscilla Graff to come once a week to file and get his work in order. I don’t think the poor girl knew what she was in for. Her first assignment was to find the two opening pages from the Easy Rider screenplay. After days of searching, an exasperated Priscilla finally found them in the bottom of the last box she looked in. One day she came by and found me in the big kitchen trying to figure out a way to clean it. She suggested that I copy what they do in restau-

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rants—pick up all the chairs and rest them on the table. I was then able to mop the entire floor easily. Priscilla and I hit it off splendidly. For years she would give me tips on how to run a farm. We became dear friends and still are to this day. A short time later, Priscilla came to me and said frantically, “I’m quitting, Gail.” I asked her why and she replied, “Dots! There are too many dots and I can’t pick up any more of them!” Terry A “happy” Terry holds the world’s stupidest dog, Hunter. had a three-prong hole-puncher and would punch holes in his papers to put in a notebook, leaving a trail of dots all over the floor. I couldn’t talk her into staying but about a week or so later she returned. Terry would write all day and through the night. I would go off to bed leaving him in his study with a fire burning and the two dogs at his feet. Sometimes in the middle of the night I would be awakened by voices and noises emanating from Terry’s room. I would creep down the hallway and peer in only to find Terry quietly scribbling away on his legal pad with the dogs fast asleep. At first I thought I was losing my mind but when it happened again I realized that Terry was acting out the characters to hear the dialogue spoken aloud. I found this very interesting and wondered if all writers did this. Sometimes he would ask me to read aloud to hear what he had written and then would revise the dialogue. Terry firmly believed that the art of writing was in the re-write. He also felt that everybody should write and encouraged me to give it a try. I never did until now. Always going to sleep with a pad and pencil on his night table just in case an idea came to him in his dreams, he thought everybody should do that too. For Terry, life on the farm was quiet and idyllic and a perfect setting for him to write. He had been working on and off on the novel Blue Movie since Dr. Strangelove. In fact, he told me it was Stanley Kubrick who gave him the

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concept for the book after they screened a blue movie somebody brought to his house. Kubrick thought it would be marvelous if a major motion picture studio produced a pornographic film with actors having real hardcore sex. Terry thought it was such an off-the-wall idea that he just ran with it. Terry completed the manuscript for Blue Movie sitting in a white Adirondack chair in a field overlooking the orchard. I would peek out of an upstairs window and watch him staring into the distance. I think he was visualizing the whole story. Every day we would rush his scribblings to a wonderful old Scots lady, who lived on a hard and stony farm nearby. She would type them up and have them ready for Terry the next day. Terry worried every time we went to deliver his pages that she would be offended by the content. He asked her one day, and she replied matter-of-factly, “I just type it, I don’t read it.” Nevertheless, many years later when we ran into her again in Great Barrington, she showed great affection towards Terry and asked for an autographed copy of the novel. Blue Movie centered on an Academy Award–winning director Boris Adrian (nicknamed King B) who teams up with exploitation producer Sid Krassman to make an expensive X-rated movie complete with Hollywood’s top stars having real sex on screen. After the two convince sultry siren Angela Sterling (who wants to be considered a “serious actress”) to star, other actors quickly agree to appear and travel to the small European country of Liechtenstein where the film is being shot and will be shown exclusively to help increase tourism. When the novel was released everybody in Hollywood read it trying to guess who was who. I know that Krassman was patterned after producer Martin Ransohoff, that the director on Stanley Kubrick whom Terry called “the great Stanley K” (Terry dedicated the book to Kubrick), and that the French character Arabella was Jeanne Moreau. I think Blue Movie is a hysterical book and one of Terry’s best as he satirized Hollywood and the moviemaking business. Unfortunately, the critics disagreed and it received middling reviews when it was published in 1970. Because of the subject matter, The New York Times wouldn’t run ads for it. Terry sent a copy to Kubrick who sent a note back saying, “Congratulations, you have written the definitive blow job.” Kubrick’s compliment gave Terry hope that he would be interested in making a film of the novel, despite the bad feelings he knew the esteemed director held for him. But again Kubrick let Terry down, claiming the material was far too racy for him to be associated with. His conservatism really surprised Terry since he was the one who came up with the original idea while watching a blue movie! While at the farm, Terry and I would make many excursions into New York City. We would drive down in our dilapidated car, with no money or no place to stay. Terry assumed we would find some place to crash, and we

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inevitably would. Jill Krementz, the photographer, took us in a number of times. She worked for the New York Herald-Tribune for a period and was known for her photos of famous writers. That is how she got to know Terry. Jill had a tiny apartment with a pullout couch, which she graciously let Terry and I sleep on. She was so generous: Thinking my shoes were too scruffy, she insisted I accept a pair of her expensive boots as a gift. Jill was a big fan of the ballet and having this in common we stayed friends for a long time. She would go on to author the book To a Young Dancer that for years I would give as gifts to my ballet students. We also spent a lot of time at the infamous Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Terry was very friendly with its longtime manager Stanley Bard who began running the grand hotel in the mid–Fifties. Many of Terry’s friends such as William Burroughs and Larry Rivers had stayed here over the years. Acclaimed director Milos Forman roomed at the Hotel Chelsea when he first came to this country in the early Seventies. He was very friendly with fellow Czech filmmaker Ivan Passer. I am not sure how Terry knew Ivan, but Ivan called and asked Terry to meet with him at El Quixote, the Spanish restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel. I accompanied Terry and we tucked into a booth as Ivan told us a strange story about Milos, who had taken to his bed and wouldn’t get up. Milos realized he had a problem, and made an appointment to see a psychiatrist. When the time came to go, he still couldn’t get out of bed. Milos suggested to Ivan that he go in his place with a list of his symptoms to share with the psychiatrist and report back to him. A torn Ivan wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, and wanted Terry’s guidance. I was laughing so hard I had to go to the ladies room. By the time I returned they had settled on a plan, and Terry and I went out into the night. Whatever Terry suggested (of course I never asked) must have worked because Milos soon became a professor of film at Columbia University and the Academy Award–winning director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Another friend who lived there was Shirley Jackson, a filmmaker in the Sixties. She resided in the penthouse and gave a huge party on the roof on a lovely summer night. The best part of the Chelsea was the ornate penthouse and the lobby, which was fabulously decorated with paintings by artists, sometimes in exchange for their room and board. The hotel had quite a collection of contemporary art, and the works in the lobby were always changing. Virgil Thomson, the composer, resided there for most of his life, and there were plaques for Mark Twain and others outside the front door. But the hotel became infamous as the place where punk rocker Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols purportedly killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen before committing suicide in 1978.

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We were desperately broke so while Terry would meet with people to try to get a writing assignment, I began taking classes at American Ballet Theater (ABT) in hopes of resuming my ballet career. As a dancer in Canada I dreamed of becoming a member of this esteemed company. At this time Leon Danielian ran the school and Lucia Chase was head of the company. Lucia was the co-founder of ABT and its first principal dancer. Danielian was considered the first American-born male dancer to achieve international fame. He studied with Anna Pavlova’s partner Michael Mordkin and danced with both ABT and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Aside from the esteemed Danielian, my teachers included Valentina Pereyslavec and Maria Swoboda. “Madame Swoboda” to her students, she was a former dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet and taught at a number of schools including the Ballet Russe. Needless to say, I was thrilled to be in the presence of all these legends of the ballet world. At thirty-two, I was one of the oldest students in the class but they all thought I was in my early twenties. Being trained as a youth, I stood out from the rest of the young dancers in the professional class along with two other ballerinas—Rosemary Menes and Roni Mahler, both former members of the Ballet Russe. We were always chosen to dance in front since we were the strongest dancers, and a herd of students would be behind us. Danielian was a wonderful teacher. He and his peers taught with such respect for the art form and for the students who chose to take part in it. But the discipline had to be there. While I was studying with him, Danielian had a hip operation and returned to class in a wheelchair. As we would hold a pose at the barre, we could hear behind us the sounds of the wheelchair as he came nearer and nearer, passing each of us just inches away from our feet. Nobody flinched despite how close he came to running over our toes. He probably did this on purpose to test our concentration. Madame Swoboda was a fantastic teacher too. She would sit eating sunflower seeds beside the grand piano, chatting away in Russian with the pianist who was endlessly banging out one classical piece after another while we went through our daily class. After we would finish, she would get up and compose an Adage for us. Because we were at such a professional level, all she had to do was just indicate the movements and we would be able to imitate them. Valentina Pereyslavec was the most vocal of my instructors and she would shout out the counts. One time I fell off the barre. She came by, picked me up by the scruff of the neck and hung me back on it. When not dancing, I would hang out at Larry River’s loft with him and Terry. The unorthodox artist that he was, Larry had an upcoming gallery show and created life-size cutouts of a scantily clad Playboy Playmate–type leaning over a table with a man with a long iridescent red light for his pro-

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truding penis taking her from behind. The man started out as Caucasian but Larry had a fascination with African-American jazz musicians so each time I saw this piece at his studio, the man got darker and darker. Terry, who loved to title things, dubbed it “Lampman Loves It.” An African-American friend of Larry’s liked Terry’s name for it so much that he took on the nom de plume “Lampman.” Once the show opened at the Janis Gallery, the staff, under the instructions of Mr. Janis, kept unplugging “Lampman’s” penis or “the cock bulb,” as Terry called it, so it wouldn’t turn on and flicker. At first Janis said the bulb kept burning out but then confessed that he received complaints about it being obscene so he unscrewed the bulb. This infuriated Larry and Terry, who were determined to get that penis to glow, so they sneakily glued the bulb into the socket. Since my dance school was nearby, I was instructed by them to go down 57th Street to the gallery and nonchalantly stroll in like I was a patron and plug the cord into the socket. This became my daily routine. When the show closed, the gallery left “Lampman” under a tarp on the curb for Larry to retrieve. I never knew what became of him after that. Terry, loving the outrageous, went gaga over Larry’s art piece and wrote a short story called “Lampman” about “an anatomically correct blow-up doll, a light bulb, and a Peeping Tom,” which he submitted to the Paris Review, published by his friend George Plimpton. I recently read the book George Being George and learned that an intern at that time read Terry’s story and rejected it, calling the tale “a horrendous piece of dreck” and “an absurd pornographic story.” According to her, the staff agreed with her but George, loving Terry, didn’t care and felt obligated to publish it no matter how dirty or bad it was perceived to be. Around this time I was asked to be a dancer in the New York City Opera production of Verdi’s Macbeth starring Grace Bumbry as Lady Macbeth. Dancers in the opera are just basically mise-en-scène but I did get to hand the diva a vase in one segment. I learned that opera singers don’t even pretend to act. Bumbry would belt out an aria while fixing her hair. Having nothing much to do, I would look down into the orchestra pit and was surprised to see so many female musicians. When I was dancing back in Canada, you were lucky to see one woman in the pit and she was usually playing the harp. As a child I wanted to become a musician but for a girl back then ballet was more acceptable. It was good to see that by 1970 things were changing for the better for women. This was such a great job because while on stage you got to hear all this melodious music from the singers on stage to the orchestra in the pit. It was like an ideal surround sound and different from how you experience it from the audience. Being a dancer, I was aware of the odd looks we would get

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from the singers. On stage they would just plant themselves in one spot and sing out. I asked my dance partner why they looked at us so strangely, aside from the fact that we were less than half their size and clad in tights and leotards. He grabbed me and gracefully dipped me to the floor, saying, “Because we can touch” while the singers watched us aghast. After a few weeks of classes, Danielian pulled me aside and asked me to join the company. This was a dream come true. Unfortunately the chickens were calling my name. To become a member I had to devote a lot of time to it and come to class every day. Because I was living in Connecticut, I would only come into the city two days a week. I decided to try to make this work because I really wanted to dance with ABT by dividing my time between the farm, Terry, and my classes. I rented a small studio apartment near Columbia University and would stay in the city Tuesday to Thursday. This was still not enough of a commitment for Danielian, who was disappointed in me. I also began having second thoughts because it occurred to me that I would be on tour for long periods of time. At this point in my life I didn’t think I could be away from Terry that much. Fortunately I never had to make the choice as it was made for me. About two months later, after I had rented the studio, it was discovered that I had a hairline fracture in my ankle. Dr. Hamilton, the doctor to all the ballet dancers in town, prescribed a bottle of painkillers and pair of crutches. My professional dancing career was over, much to the elation of Terry and the hungry livestock. To be fair, Terry did support my aspirations to dance at ABT. On the other hand, he did because he thought all the male dancers were gay (they weren’t) and it was a “safe” environment for me to work—nobody to hit on me, or so he thought. This was fairly primitive of him but nobody’s perfect. I certainly wasn’t. Terry was very impressed with the ballet world because as he said once, “There is no amateur standing.” One day he came to pick me up from my class with Vladimir Dokoudovsky. The Duke, as he was called, danced with such companies as Opera de Monte Carlo, National Polish Ballet, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and the Danish Royal Ballet. He retired at an early age due to severe arthritis and then became a well-respected teacher. Though only about fifty, the hunched dancer seemed much older than his years. Terry watched from the doorway one day as Dokoudovsky put down his long cigarette and with his crippled body leaped to the center of the studio. He then proceeded to compose his famous endless Adage, which we were obliged to remember immediately and do it both on the left and right side. As professionally trained dancers, we were all able to do this, which awed Terry. I was used to Terry’s strange behavior regarding unpleasant situations. He felt, wrongly of course, that by ignoring matters they would just go away.

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I presumed that is why he still had not discussed divorce with his wife. He was just hoping the matter would settle itself. After I fractured my ankle I learned that he also couldn’t handle anything wrong with me. In his eyes I was just supposed to be the perfect “Miss Beach Ball.” My being on crutches really upset him but not enough for him take the wheel as I drove to Larry Rivers’ house in South Hampton one weekend. Despite my injury I was able to work the gas pedal and brake with my right foot and got us safely to our destination. Larry, who was such a great guy and who I miss to this day, was much more sympathetic to my plight and offered me his king-size bed to sleep in. While I rested comfortably, Terry and Larry stayed up ’til dawn drinking and discussing everything from politics to show business as was their way. Back home, Terry was behaving badly, sulking about my “imperfect” condition. I took the hint, packed up my crutches, and flew to Vancouver to visit my mother and her husband. After I arrived in Canada, Terry called every day to see how I was doing but I knew that was just a pretense for him to be checking up on me. No matter where I went, he always thought there would be some guy making a pass at me. When I returned to the farm, some of our first visitors were Rip Torn and Geraldine Page with their three sweet children. Geraldine walked up the drive with a great big leg of lamb tucked underneath her arm while Rip held up a bottle of Wild Turkey, which he and Terry easily polished off in one day. The twins, Tony and John, were nice quiet boys who were content to sit on the sofa in the living room reading the giant Encyclopedia Britannica. They were truly city kids and the great outdoors didn’t interest them a bit, to the chagrin of their father who wanted to teach them to fish and hunt with Terry. Undaunted, the good ol’ Texas boys were able to cajole poor Nile to come shoot with them and would pin a paper target onto an ancient apple tree. Rip stored his collection of guns at the farm with Terry’s, which were all loaded, leaning up against a corner in the hallway. You don’t know how many times I bumped into them while cleaning only to have them clatter noisily to the floor. It is a wonder none of them ever went off. For Rip and Geraldine’s lovely daughter Angelica I decorated one of the bedrooms with flowers so she would have her private little girl space. I quickly noticed that Angelica and her brothers were not used to eating lunch or dinner together as a family around a table. With two working parents, they rarely experienced this. That day I served lunch on the picnic table under a big oak tree. The geese had a horrible habit of coming over to the table every time we ate outdoors. They are nasty creatures and one had the audacity to peck at the great Geraldine Page’s bottom that was sticking out over the bench. She was literally goosed by a goose! Needless to say, this annoyed the Acad-

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emy Award winner though her children roared with laughter. I immediately jumped up and shooed the mangy birds away. One summer weekend the Torn family came up for a visit but I had to abandon them one day as I rented a bus to take some local children and some old folks to see a Russian ballet at the Met. I popped a pork roast (it was one of Tiny Sow’s brothers) into the oven at a low temperature before I left. When I returned late in the day I asked Gerry, who had set the table and made the side dishes, if anyone looked in on my roast. “Noooo,” she said, like it would have been an invasion of privacy or an insult to me. I thought that was amusing as I hesitantly peeked into the oven. Fortunately, all was well. We had a marvelous time and the meal was delicious. Today Angelica Torn is an accomplished actress, screenwriter, and mentor to up-and-coming actors. She recalls being introduced to country living and alcohol at the farm: My parents couldn’t afford a country house of their own during my youth. A dilapidated brownstone in the then high crime neighborhood of Chelsea in New York City and a governor’s ruins in Mexico purchased for $7,000 stretched their housing budget to its limit. My father being friends with Terry Southern arranged various forays to the magical northwest corner of Connecticut to take refuge from the chaos of city life. Driving past the rock quarry on the outskirts of North Canaan, Connecticut, was always a sure sign of momentary delights. We would cross Blackberry River to arrive at the farm house where I would spend many years learning to cook and garden; gather fresh eggs; and make lip stain from fresh berries. One of my earliest memories takes me back to being greeted by Gail and shown to my guest room. Inside was a child-sized bed built into an alcove high above the ground with ladder steps to climb. A vase overflowing with freshly cut Lily of the Valley scented the still summer air. The visits were always filled with exotic tastes, smells, sights, and sounds. Once while having lunch in the dining room I gazed out towards the graveyard to see a pair of cows walking casually across the yard to a random destination. Another visit during my early pre-teens promised a magical delight of intoxication. A vat of dandelion wine had been fermenting in an enormous crock in the kitchen. Only the yellow tops of the flower could be used as any green stems or leaves would promise bitterness. The wine was served in the tiniest of stemmed glasses with jeweled golden liquid shimmering in the afternoon sunlight. The taste was sweet and exquisite. The effect was life-altering. The joy of discovering the ability to pratfall without fear or pain seized my imagination and my life-long love of unusual alcohol concoctions was cemented. I have yet to realize my dream to create dandelion wine of my own served to a new generation of young artists from tiny stemmed glasses with Lily of the Valley wafting through the air.

Nile was our constant visitor and would come stay with us every weekend. Of course with Terry immersed in whatever project he was working on,

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it was left to me to entertain his son most times. I took Nile skiing every winter, the first time when he was only about seven or eight and we went to Catamount Mountain, which is just down the road from Mrs. Durphy’s Inn. It is a steep and icy slope at the best of times and not what young Nile was used to. I found him at the bottom of the Bunny Slope crying in frustration with his nose running because he couldn’t get his little red skis to move out of the slush. I asked him where his mother would take him to ski and in between sobs he choked out, “Butternut,” so off we went to his favorite place to ski. Situated in the middle of the Berkshires of Massachusetts, Butternut was a much more serene mountain and just glorious for family skiing. Being more adventurous, Nile wanted to ride the lift up to a broad manicured slope, which he had skied before. However, we had a rough time trying to get him onto the lift. We perfected a routine that I used for years until he was tall enough so that the lift would not hit him on the back of the head. I would hold our poles under one arm and align both our skis into the tracks while watching for the ski lift to come up behind us. I had to time it just right to lift him up and plop him into the chair while making sure I got on it as well. I would then quickly hand him his poles and pull down the safety bar. For most of Nile’s childhood we would ski Butternut though we did eventually go back to Catamount for another run at it. I had a lot of fun spending time with Nile. If it weren’t for him I probably would have never bothered to ski again. Because Nile was not my child, I tended to treat him more like an equal and that allowed me to revisit my youth. Nile and I would go skiing well into his teenage years. Sometimes Terry would join us for “après ski” and would stay behind at the ski lodge writing away while his son and I would spend the whole day on the slopes. Despite our enthusiasm for the sport, Terry (who just reveled in being sedentary) had no interest whatsoever in learning to ski. During his quiet time in the bar, Terry was able to get a lot of work done while having his drinks refreshed without even having to ask. Needless to say, he just loved our ski outings. At the end of the day we would join him for dinner and afterwards as we headed to the car, Terry, in a totally professional manner, would sling Nile’s skis over one shoulder and poles over the other, hooking them together. If you didn’t know Terry, you would swear he was an ace skier based on the way he carried the skis. One summer, perhaps feeling a tad guilty over his indifference to Nile’s love of skiing, Terry tried his “lad and dad” routine and decided to get Nile interested in his favorite sport—boxing. As a youth, Terry was on his high school boxing team in the lightweight division though by this time he was

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more of a heavyweight. I came into our breezeway one day to find father and son wearing red boxing gloves with Terry showing Nile how to throw some punches. The poor kid had a look of horror on his face and was so uncomfortable that Terry gave up. I never saw either pair of gloves again. Terry never pushed Nile to do anything he didn’t want to and he was not authoritative at all with his son, who was basically a good, quiet boy. However, even the best behaved kids need to be told what to do at times. Many a night with Terry writing furiously, Nile would be dozing in a chair with his dog by his side, just waiting to be instructed to go to bed. He would eventually make the decision himself and stagger off to his room while an oblivious Terry was concentrating on his work. After striking out with his attempts to teach Nile to shoot, fish and box, Terry finally came up with an idea and hit pay dirt with his son. Remembering how they bonded over their love for that spooky soap Dark Shadows, it finally dawned on Terry that Nile might share his interest in moviemaking. Terry enjoyed working in cinema and wanted Nile to develop a skill within the industry such as cinematographer or editor. Terry then went out and bought a Super 8mm film camera. It was quite an expensive gift for a tenyear-old. He gave it to his son who was ecstatic and finally Terry’s “lad and dad” routine was a hit. Together they made their own movie over a period of time. Nile hadn’t shown interest in anything this much since we started skiing together. The film was a murder mystery about an artist. I had a role and remember them filming me on the phone calling the police because I thought someone was in the house. Later, in the garage, they shot a painting that Terry picked up at a yard sale. As Nile filmed, Terry splashed red paint onto it, trying to make it to look like blood dripping from the painting. The following Thanksgiving when I went searching frantically for my bulb-baster, I discovered that they had used it to spray the red paint during their shoot. Needless to say, I was irate having a turkey cooking for three hours and nothing to baste it with. Away from the farm, Terry still spent a lot of time with his best friend Larry Rivers, who had a block-long First Avenue loft stretching from 14th Street to 13th Street. It was on the top floor of a six-story building with half of it dedicated to his studio and the rest to his living quarters. It is “rumored” that in Larry’s bedroom area there was a knothole in the floor through which he could watch sculptor Klaus Oldenberg having raucous sex with his wife below. Terry and Larry never let me see the hole but I would overhear them talking about it often. Laughing merrily, they were like two little schoolboys who found a peephole into the girls’ shower. Larry was one of Tatyana Grossman’s clients. She was famous for starting a printmaking business called Universal Limited Art Editions. She got a

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Larry Rivers (left) and Terry (right) sign The Donkey and the Darling at Larry’s Hampton home with one of Tanya Grossman’s helpers (center) lending a hand.

number of famous artists including Larry, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, and Robert Rauschenberg to travel to her East Islip workshop to create prints. One day Terry and I met her at Larry’s place in the Hamptons. Tatyana (or Tanya as her friends called her) told Terry that she was interested in having Larry illustrate one of his unpublished stories. Terry admired both Larry and Tanya’s talents and thought this was such a great original idea. She chose a children’s story called “The Donkey and the Darling,” which Terry wrote in 1955. It was more of a fable for grownups with totally anthropomorphic characters such as kittens and dogs. Her idea was to create lithographs of each page with Terry’s text wound through Larry’s drawings. Each print, to be individually signed by Larry and Terry, would be considered its own separate art work and housed together in a green box. Needless to say, this project took seven years to reach fruition with us making many trips to Larry’s house in the Hamptons. Under the watchful eye of Tanya, Terry and Larry would sign pages (oddly sized at 181 ⁄8 by 217 ⁄16 in.) for a couple of hours before tiring out and begging their stern taskmaster to let them take part in the evening revelries. Tanya always gave in and the boys were able to join that night’s party. When the box set was released in 1977, it sold for a lot of money and was purchased mostly by private collectors and museums. Terry received a fee upfront for the use of his text (we

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needed the money desperately) and earned no royalties on any of the sales. As for the lithographs, they were phenomenal. Larry beautifully brought to life Terry’s characters. Today it is considered a collector’s item and is probably worth thousands of dollars. Too bad we weren’t savvy enough to obtain a set.

9. The IRS Blues We didn’t know it at the time but 1972 would be a life-changing year for us. One beautiful late spring morning I was sitting in the kitchen having my coffee and enjoying the warmth of the sunshine as I prepared to leave for class. Terry was upstairs still asleep after having written all night. I looked out the window and noticed a nondescript brown four-door car creeping slowly down the long driveway. It parked and sat there for awhile. Eventually the driver’s door opened and out popped a small “Kafka-esque” man. He had watery eyes behind glasses thick as a Coke bottle bottom and was wearing a brown suit and carrying a matching briefcase. He walked slowly to the front door and knocked. When I opened it, he announced that he was from the IRS and asked if Terry Southern was at home. I lied and said no. He asked me who I was and I told him, “The housekeeper.” He then turned and left without saying a word. Hours later when Terry awoke, I told him about the strange car and the stranger man from the IRS who was looking for him. Clutching a yellow legal pad near his chest, he just sighed. I could not tell if he knew or didn’t know what this was about. The next thing I remember, Terry was on the wall phone in the kitchen asking in a very urgent tone of voice, “How am I supposed to live?” Overhearing this, I knew we were in trouble but I didn’t ask any questions and Terry didn’t offer any explanations. He didn’t want me to worry but I sensed that he was disturbed. The next thing I knew, I was in my car driving Terry to Great Neck, Long Island, to meet with some tax lawyers who were recommended to him for their experience in these matters. I pulled into the parking lot of an L-shaped suburban strip mall, complete with dry cleaners and pizza parlor, and Terry disappeared into their office above a Chinese restaurant. It was a hot summer’s day so I sat in the car with the window open and the radio on. Between napping and listening to a jazz station, five hours had gone by. Terry finally emerged from the office completely frazzled. I asked him how it went and all he said was, “I don’t think I can take their advice.” Of course, being me I didn’t ask what that counsel was even though I had sat there for hours waiting. As he normally did, Terry retreated from reality by writing all the way home. In hindsight, I realized that the lawyers had to be Mafia attor147

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neys and that is why they had so much knowledge of tax evasion since that is how the FBI would go after their clients. A week or so later, Terry informed me that we had to go to the IRS offices in Stamford, Connecticut. Off we went with me behind the wheel and Terry scribbling away on his writing tablet. Again I sat in the car while Terry dealt with the unpleasantness. By the time they let Terry go, it was dark. He came over to the driver’s side and said, “Guess what they asked me?” “What?” I replied. “They asked if Gail Gerber was a pseudonym.” I had recently received a $3,000 check from the Screen Actors Guild for back residuals and had deposited it into my personal account. They obviously were investigating me as well. I just burst into tears but I don’t know why I did. Ever the gentleman, Terry just “Hrrumff”ed and got into the passenger side of the car and started to write. He could never handle crying women so he just ignored me. I finally learned that Terry never filed income taxes for 1966 and 1967. I was dumbfounded. I said to him, “Didn’t you ever ask yourself why you never signed any tax forms in the past few years? Everybody has to sign their taxes.” He just kept silent. For years, everybody suspected that Terry’s film business partner Si Litvanoff got him into this fix. Terry never publicly held Si responsible (or anyone else for that matter). Si in that same letter (dated July 19, 2000) where he recounted what he remembered about A Clockwork

Happily posing with my crops soon before our idyllic life on the farm would become harrowing.

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Orange went on to set the record straight and to exonerate himself regarding the tax matter: I left the practice of law at Barovick, Konecky & Litvinoff in June 1966 and took a suite of offices at 65 E. 55th Street with an office for Terry and prepared to produce a Broadway play directed by Alan Arkin (partially financed by Apple—the Beatles’ company—Lieber & Stoller and Max Raab). The play opened in November 1966. By the end of 1966 and most of ’67 I was in production on The Queen. Obviously that is why in ’66 and ’67 I referred all of Terry’s data to that date to a top theatrical accountant who I had enough confidence in to hire for my Broadway show. I would not even know if he filed his return. I spent a great deal of happy time thereafter with Terry but any advice I may have given was as a friend—not as a lawyer or tax man. I was entering a world he was more familiar with than I, and I was too busy to have the responsibility to have clients. A ’66 tax return would be filed in ’67. A ’67 tax return would be filed in ’68. I lived in California in ’68 and by ’69 I was living in London. I did not prepare those returns. It is possible that they may have had the E. 55th Street address—in care of me for Terry’s convenience—I don’t know—but the innuendo irks me greatly ... I loved Terry and would always try (when I was around) to protect him and help him.

Terry sometimes could be so irresponsible with business matters, he probably let what Si told him go in one ear and out the other. I never heard Terry mention the new accountant’s name and he probably thought the tax guy would be contacting him. That was an extremely busy period for Terry as we were constantly on the move so, as with matters he considered unpleasant, he ignored it to his detriment. Realizing he was in real trouble with the government, Terry contacted Richard Ben-Veniste in Washington, D.C., who coincidentally had recently sent him a fan letter. He was an assistant U.S. attorney and would go on to serve in the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office as chief of the Watergate Task Force. Terry asked for his help in trying to straighten out the matter. Richard was an extremely nice fellow but he wasn’t able to do much. He did send us five pages from Terry’s FBI dossiers, which we never knew existed at the time. I was flabbergasted that the Feds were keeping tabs on Terry. He, though, wasn’t shocked in the least. He had written a novel—Candy—that was deemed pornographic and was an active Vietnam War protestor so due to his “celebrity status” he sort of expected it. In hindsight, I should have known we were under surveillance. One day when Terry, Nile and Rip Torn were out in the back shooting targets that were pinned to a half-dead apple tree, Rip with his binoculars spotted a guy on the bank of the river across the way. Rip said, “Hey, Terry. There’s a guy watching us through binoculars.” Terry said, “Don’t be silly. How do you know that?” Rip said, “Because I’m looking directly at him through my binoculars.” Obviously, he had to be a Federal agent.

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The FBI pages from Terry’s dossier were dated March 1965. Most of it was devoted to the supposed pornographic nature of Terry’s novel Candy and how the Feds were trying to ban its sale. The state’s Vice Squad had given book sellers notice to remove the books from circulation. The police chief in Hartford, Connecticut, is quoted as saying, “If any books are found on newsstands ... arrests will be made.” One page contradicts itself by claiming “5 million copies of Candy are presently on the newsstands” and then boasting “it is laying an egg.” The most absurd charge accuses Terry of having “one of the finest collections of pornographic films in the country, including some made for King Farouk.” This stems from when Terry used to regale his guests with outrageous stories about Farouk while we dined at Mateo’s in Beverly Hills. Obviously, we were being watched by the Feds and they distorted Terry’s story into a false fact—scary. Unbelievably, the part that upset Terry most was where they described his wife as “a ‘beatnik,’ in that she is ‘sloppy and extremely dirty.’” He felt that was an unfair description and that she was probably toiling in the garden while the FBI was spying on them. Reading a part of this file, it all started to make sense why Terry didn’t get any movie writing assignments. The studios must have been aware that the FBI was keeping a file and blackballed him. Any other writer with two Academy Award nominations would have been in constant demand back then. But after he left MGM in 1966, not one studio solicited him for work. The movies he worked on afterwards were all independent productions. Terry needed a lawyer and decided he wanted a radical one at that. He approached Catherine Roraback, one of the country’s best-known defender of civil liberties. Practicing from her offices in Canaan, Connecticut, she litigated several very high-profile cases, including Griswold v. Connecticut, which recognized reproductive health rights for women, and Women v. Connecticut, the counterpart to Roe v. Wade, which struck down the state’s antiabortion statutes. Needless to say, her time was extremely occupied and a tax evasion case was not a priority for her. She said to Terry, “I am too busy to take you on as a client but I have two very good young associates that could help you.” Terry chose one—another mistake to add to his many poor business choices over the years. The attorney was of no help but I presume that was because he was only able to practice law in Connecticut and Terry needed a federal lawyer. However, the young attorney was very affable and Terry hired him for years to come to handle local matters for us. If things could get even worse, Terry was served with divorce papers from his wife’s attorney. Terry told me that since he was so renowned, he was suspected of hiding money. When I heard this, I laughed. We were practically penniless and it would be like trying to squeeze blood from a stone. But it got me thinking. I said to Terry, “You know, you are famous, so why

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are we broke?” In typical Terry fashion, he deadpanned, “What makes you think fame and fortune go together?” I am not sure what their official arrangement was, but Terry was paying the rent on an expensive Upper Eastside apartment, private school (Dalton) for Nile, and other living expenses. If he had any additional money, he would gladly have shared it. Also at this time the IRS siezed Terry’s wife’s bank account. I believe this was the impetus for her to file for divorce. I know I would have. They emptied Terry’s account as well. After he was served with the papers, Terry did not contest it and signed the decree. Unfortunately we did not have the hindsight to buy out her share of the farm. But even if Terry had the means to, he probably still wouldn’t have broached the subject with her as he never had the foresight to invest in our future. He lived in the moment. During this tumultuous period, Boris Grurevich of all people reappeared in our lives. I was up early, making breakfast, on a lovely summer morning around eight-thirty when a car came down the driveway and two guys got out. I immediately saw that one of them was Boris and felt instant dread. Terry and Nile, who was visiting, were asleep upstairs. Not having a choice in the matter as I recalled his last visit, I invited Boris and his friend in and offered them some coffee. The handsome young man was African-American, impeccably clad in a pastel Mohair sweater, and totally blasé. He had obviously been recruited, reluctantly I might add, to come along for the ride. Boris was prancing impatiently around the kitchen waiting for Terry, who usually slept until eleven. He did his best writing late at night so I didn’t expect him up for hours. At one point, Boris’ friend was leaning against our giant kitchen fireplace when the crazy Bulgarian took a gun from over the mantle and fired it. It was loaded, like all of our rifles. As Terry used to say, “What’s the use of an unloaded gun?” The bullet just missed the young man and went straight through a pewter mantle dish and into the brick wall of the chimney, inches from his ear. Of course, that woke everybody up. Nile, clad in his pajamas, came running down the stairs, trailed closely by Terry. Surveying the scene, a surprisingly calm Terry offered the dazed young man a glass of Scotch to calm his nerves. “I’m not a drinking man,” he replied, “but I believe I will.” Terry then escorted the two men into the living room to talk, and a lot of cigarette smoke later, they departed. Boris had come to shake Terry down for money thinking he was still owed something from the story Terry wrote about him in Esquire many years before, but Terry of course had none with the IRS closing in and his impending divorce. Terry’s luck finally changed when somebody, I don’t recall who, recommended an attorney who could actually help him. A tax lawyer based in Washington was engaged in extracting Jack Kerouac’s dossiers from

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FBI, CIA and Secret Service files. He turned out to be very skilled and knowledgeable in settling the IRS claim against Terry. To this day I do not know how it was resolved. Again Terry, trying to shield me from the ugliness, said as little as possible. All I knew was that he was free and clear. With money woes still vexing us, Terry was much relieved when The Saturday Review, whose editor-in-chief was Norman Cousins, a prominent advocate of liberal causes, hired him to accompany Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on their infamous Rolling Stones American Tour. Just as Terry gave his first-hand account of the 1968 Democratic Convention to Esquire, The Saturday Review wanted a cover story on the famous rock group. The editors knew Terry was friendly with Mick and Keith so they thought he’d be able to get more of an insider’s perspective. Before he accepted, Terry asked me if he should go. I responded exuberantly, “Yes!” We needed the money so badly so off he went for a few weeks beginning in June while I took care of the homestead. The tour, organized initially to promote the Stones’ new album Exile on Main Street that was released in May 1972, was nicknamed the S.T.P. Tour (for Stones Touring Party). Andy Warhol designed a symbol for the group’s jaunt that was emblazoned on the plane’s fuselage. Terry described it in The Saturday Review as “a giant, red extended tongue, not outthrust so much as lolling or lapping. Hence the craft’s name, unofficially, The Lapping Tongue...” Besides Terry, a number of correspondents accompanied the Stones. After gigs in Fort Worth, Houston, Dallas, and Nashville, the tour came to New Orleans where Truman Capote, hired by Rolling Stone magazine to do a piece on it, climbed on board with an entourage consisting of Princess Lee Radziwill and artist Peter Hill Beard. Rolling Stone also had a second reporter on board named Robert Greenfield who delivered a wonderful article after Capote was not able to produce a story. Terry titled his cover story “The Rolling Stones’ U.S. Tour: Riding the Lapping Tongue.” His opening line instantly set the tone for the reader of what it was like to travel with these superstars of rock ’n’ roll: Whether it’s New York or Tuscaloosa, Norfolk or L.A., one factor is constant: the dressing room of the Rolling Stones is always Groove City—the juice flows, smoke rises, crystals crumble, poppers pop, teenies hang in, and Mick knifes through like a ballet-dancing matador ... all to the funky wail of Keith’s guitar tuning up, and sometimes the honking sax of a solid, down-home pickup sideman.... And in Buddha repose, Charlie sits twirling his sticks Sid Cattlett–style. Scene of good karma.

When Terry returned home, the first thing he told me was how much fun he had with Truman Capote (or as Terry nicknamed him, “Tru-Baby”). Terry was so amused by Capote because he wore ear plugs the entire time.

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When they were in San Francisco, the Stones asked Terry and Capote to visit the sprawling island prison Alcatraz because they thought it would be a great venue to put on a concert. Capote gave them the idea while in the plane flying over it, exclaiming how the pent-up prisoners would surely love Keith and Mick. The warden agreed but his security people vetoed the idea due to safety concerns. Terry and Capote also would fabricate absurd hijack stories and the subsequent media coverage. One had Capote skyjacking the Rolling Stones’ plane “by claiming to have ‘a laser beam concealed on my person’”; that one made it into Terry’s article. When the Stones played Dallas, Terry confessed to me that he never got off the plane. He had no interest in setting foot in the city he grew up in, which was full of bad memories for him. His father was a chemist and owned a drug store in Alvarado, Texas. His mother was a milliner and furrier. During the Depression when Terry was eight years old, his father began drinking and moved the family to Dallas because the local townspeople couldn’t pay their bills. Despite his new business and home, Terry’s father’s drinking became worse. Every Sunday while loaded he would want to drive through the city streets and every Sunday Terry and his mother would play the same game of hiding his car keys. After graduating high school, Terry became exasperated with the whole situation and handed his father the keys saying, “If you want to kill yourself, go ahead.” He then took off for Los Angeles where he enlisted in the army and never looked back. I am sure the Dallas concert was not the only performance Terry skipped out on. Knowing what a sedentary person he was, I bet he found himself a nice comfortable spot on the jet and sat there while the flight attendants (whom Terry described as “two fabulous teenies nicknamed Ruby T. and Brown Sugar”) refreshed his drink (Tequila Sunrise was his cocktail of choice during this nonstop party) and passed the “toot.” Terry partook, caught up in the party atmosphere. Terry did hand in his article on time and I feel that his piece really captured the essence of the Rolling Stones’ phenomenon and what it was like to be on the road with them. He cleverly wrote it like a movie script with camera movements included when he would jump to a new topic. For example, one paragraph began, “Slow pull back revealing Mick not alone on stage but with several others. Pan left, in on Keith.” Terry especially liked Mick, and his fondness for the lead singer shines through. He praised him to the hilt and remarked, “Mick Jagger has perhaps the single greatest talent for ‘putting a song across’ of anyone in the history of the performing arts. In his movements he has somehow combined the most dramatic qualities of James Brown, Rudolf Nureyev, and Marcel Marceau.” Terry went on to divulge that Mick’s wild public persona was so different from the man himself, whom

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Terry described as being “quiet, generous, and sensitive.” Terry felt that Mick was able to fool his fans due to his acting talent. He praised his superb acting in the movie Performance and bemoaned that Kubrick didn’t cast him in A Clockwork Orange, which Terry surely would have. Not wanting to shortshrift his good friend Keith Richards, Terry extolled his guitar-playing and his underrated songwriting skills, comparing his talent to that of Paul McCartney. The remainder of the article described quite humorously some of the more outrageous occurrences with the fans and the police at various concert venues around the country. In the piece, Terry also got in a jab at all his past and future editors. When describing the pleasures of drinking a Tequila Sunrise, he claimed the drink was “so prized by dehydrated athletes, entertainers, and heavily dexed writers working against viciously unfair deadlines.” Terry always had trouble handing in his pages because he felt “the art of writing was in the re-write” and felt with more time he could always make it better. Terry’s article was well-received but The Saturday Review was not a bigselling magazine. It was popular with radical liberals and pseudo-intellectuals; the young hip crowd, which Terry used to reach, was reading Rolling Stone. It really didn’t bring him any notoriety or any new writing assignments though he did contribute an occasional freelance article to the National Lampoon. Coincidentally, a concert film from this tour received limited release in 1974 while Robert Frank’s documentary Cocksucker Blues was a cinéma vérité of what went on behind the scenes. The film was unreleased at the insistence of Mick and the Stones, who feared that if it was seen by the public, they would never again get visas to work in the U.S. I have never seen the movie but I know Terry pops up in it. He also revealed to me that though the title was PR hype, there was a lot of cocksucking going on around him throughout the flights. While Terry was on tour, I was driving through a nearby village when I noticed a sign that advertised the Sharon Ballet School with a name that I remembered from my childhood in Vancouver. I stopped by to see if indeed it was the same person, and sure enough it was. Barbara Bartlett was her name and we attended the same ballet school. She had been in a class with “older girls.” I recalled her as being an “odd duck” as she went in and out of her classes. She towered over the other girls and spoke with a booming voice. I asked her if she remembered me, and she said, “Of course.” After we had chatted for awhile, she invited me to teach for her. The school was only open a few days a week and Barbara commuted from New York City. Because no money was coming in and whatever Terry did earn had to go for support of his wife and son, I decided to accept her offer and thus began my twentyfive-year career of teaching.

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Barbara had started her ballet studies too late and grown too tall for a career in the ballet. So like many do, she turned to teaching. She was a member of a Guild, the Royal Academy of Dancing in London, and that gave her qualification, of sorts. However, Barbara was not the best of teachers. She taught this watered-down method from the Guild’s syllabus and she was not able to enthrall her eager students in the least. She became the scourge of every eight-year-old that took a class. It was reminiscent of sending your child to a piano teacher down the street where the kid gets turned off forever from playing music. I joined the Guild and started to teach with a style much different than Barbara’s. I wanted to instruct them the way I was taught in Canada. I didn’t abandon the syllabus totally because it is a useful guide for teaching. However, in the hands of some it is a license to practice in a most amateurish way. The parents don’t know the value of the classes that they are paying for until it is too late for their children to have a chance for a career. It is a “painting by numbers” teaching method. I had a much different philosophy and relationship with the students. When one of mine would perform well, I would say, “That’s great, do it again.” Barbara on the other hand was actually mean to her kids and would say to me, “You praise them too much, Gail.” Despite our differences, we got along nicely and I worked with her off and on for years. After the school closed, I was surprised to learn that she got a job driving a bus in New York City when she was one of the worst drivers I ever encountered. Terry was not home very long from the Rolling Stones tour when he jetted off to Hollywood, for what I do not recall. While home alone, I discovered that he had the quaint habit of throwing away all the monthly bills. I was glued to the television, along with the rest of the country, watching avidly the Watergate hearings, which completely fascinated me. The phone rang on a Friday and the voice on the other end informed me that the electricity was to be cut off. I told him that the person responsible was away, and couldn’t be reached, and I was watching the hearings. He kindly gave me a reprieve until Monday before turning off the power, so I could continue watching. I confronted Terry when he came home and his excuse was that a famous writer did the test of holding letters up to the light; if there was a check in it he’d open it, if not he threw it away. Terry loved his logic and did the same. That explained all the previous times the phone or lights went off briefly but I hadn’t noticed until it affected my TV watching. Needless to say, I took over the household finances after this. We needed money and Terry needed a paying job. Enter David Oppenheim, husband of Terry’s friend Ellen Adler and a dean of N.Y.U.’s School of the Arts. Terry had known Ellen from his days in France and remained

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close to her until his death. She was very bourgeois even though she always surrounded herself with crazy guys like Terry and Larry Rivers. One time she called me from the Hamptons while I was visiting a friend in Soho and said, “Gail, you’ve got to come and get these guys out of my house.” Terry and Larry were once again running amok. Knowing that we were in dire financial straits, the always helpful Ellen suggested to her husband that Terry teach at the school. Terry was hired to instruct one class, Screenwriting 101, once a week. I re-arranged my teaching schedule so I could drive him down into the city every Wednesday. While he went off to teach, I took ballet class with an assortment of master teachers. I even took a jazz dance class with the famous Luigi (nee Eugene Louis Faccuito) at his studio, The World’s First Jazz Centre. Nicknamed Luigi by Gene Kelly, he danced in Hollywood musicals and on Broadway before opening his dance studio where his special method helps dancers to use their bodies properly, decreasing the risk of injury. During the early Seventies his students ranged from novices to celebrities including Liza Minnelli, Robert Morse, John Travolta, Susan Stroman, BarBara Luna, and Carol Lynley. I didn’t need jazz instruction but he had a bass player and drummer playing live in all his classes and I just wanted to hear the music. Luigi was a wonderful teacher and the classes were great fun. Afterwards Terry and I would meet up for dinner and then drive home. While I was dancing away, Terry was having a difficult go at it at NYU. His first day he was so shy that it was torturous for his students. They wanted to help him, but didn’t know what to do. The following week, Terry moved the class to a pub across the street, took a seat in the back booth, and ordered a big stein of beer. Each student had a half-hour private consultation with him to discuss their work. The students loved it. Who wouldn’t? The dean, that’s who. Terry got away with it that first semester but the next semester, when Oppenheim discovered that Terry’s teaching venue was not a classroom but a bar, a meeting was quickly arranged with the outraged administration. As he came out of the session, he said to me, “I don’t know why they are so upset—that’s the way they taught in Germany.” He was allowed to finish up the term, continuing instructing his pupils from the bar but he wasn’t invited back for a third semester. Besides his class, Terry kept busy following a murder investigation right in our sleepy village. Our 29-acre pre–Revolutionary War farm in the Berkshires was on a quiet country road outside of the village of Canaan near the Massachusetts border. It’s a working class town that services the rich New England villages surrounding it. In September 1973 our local weekly newspaper began to cover the story of a particularly gruesome murder. A single mother named Barbra Gibbons, who lived in an isolated cottage with her teenage son, was

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found dead. She had various broken bones and her throat was cut, causing her to bleed to death. Her son Peter Reilly, who went to the local high school, found her body on her bedroom floor after returning from a dance at the town’s Methodist Church. He called the police and they immediately arrested him. Taking Reilly to the Canaan Police Station, the state troopers interrogated him for twenty-four hours or so without counsel and he signed a statement implicating himself. Needless to say, the murder and Reilly’s arrest and ordeal was big news in Canaan. Terry, like the rest of the townspeople, kept up with the intrigue every day. Terry recognized a pattern of behavior from his small-town Texas past and just felt that the boy was being railroaded. Other local people seemed to also know that something was wrong and couldn’t believe this slight, sweet boy was capable of such a heinous act. There were collection tins at every business for the Peter Reilly Defense Fund. The whole town was totally focused and grim-faced. Catherine Roraback, who had turned down the job of representing Terry in his tax evasion case, was Peter’s high-profile attorney but despite her best efforts he was convicted of manslaughter in the first degree based mostly on his “confession.” Small-town justice, or injustice, had been carried out, but Terry like many others still believed in the boy’s innocence. He clipped out all the newspaper stories and sent them to his friend, playwright Arthur Miller, who lived nearby, and to The New York Times. Miller and then another neighbor, author William Styron, began speaking out in Reilly’s defense. Terry never spoke out in public. I guess it was because we had to live in Canaan and Terry knew what it was like to go against small-town cops. He probably thought it was safer for an outsider like Miller to make the case public. But his behind-the-scenes work of getting the story out to his friends eventually helped the boy. An appeal was filed and Miller got Peter another lawyer. Eventually, Judge John Speziale overthrew the jury’s decision but left it open for a retrial. As preparations began for the new court case, state prosecutor John Bianchi was struck and killed by lightning on the eighteenth hole of the local golf course—divine justice? His successor uncovered evidence right in Bianchi’s own files exonerating Peter Reilly. All charges against him were dropped but the case remains unsolved. Terry may have been distracted from helping Peter Reilly because of an article that was published in Playboy magazine’s November 1973 issue. Writer Sam Merrill interviewed Mason Hoffenberg (Terry’s once good friend and co-author of Candy) for a piece entitled “Mason Hoffenberg Gets in a Few Licks.” A former drug addict, Hoffenberg had kicked his habit but was now an alcoholic living in the home of musician Richard Manuel of The Band

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in Woodstock, New York. Merrill brazenly revealed that he interviewed the washed-up poet at a pub where Hoffenberg downed eight martinis. After reading the interview, Terry became livid. I had never seen him get so angry. I asked him what was wrong and his protectiveness kicked in. Not only didn’t he tell me but he also wouldn’t let me read the story. Later I learned that Mason claimed that Terry was his apprentice in learning to be hip in Paris and that Terry never got laid. More insultingly, he railed that Terry was just a “re-writer” and ripped off ideas from David Burnett, among others. Of course, Terry was most insulted with the “never getting laid” remark and fired off a letter to the editor. He stated that Mason lived a “fanstasyville existence” and that all his remarks were “generous, sheer bullshit—especially about Hoff getting laid in Paris; he most certainly did not get laid in Paris.” Hoffenberg’s words steamed Terry so much that he filed a lawsuit against him, Sam Merrill, and Playboy. Terry was never one to sue and would let unpleasant situations just pass by. Hell, he never even went after the money owed him for Easy Rider. This though was different as Mason’s attack called into question Terry’s writing talent and I think that is what galled him the most. Terry had a reputation to protect since most of his screenplays were collaborations and he didn’t want Mason’s insinuations to hinder his chances of working in the film business. Terry gave a deposition in the case as it progressed but in 1975 a New York judge dismissed it with prejudice. Terry did not receive any damages and no retraction was ever printed. However, all involved never said anything on the record or published a word about Terry ever again. About ten years later, while driving back from teaching in the late afternoon, I saw Terry’s old car in the parking lot of the local pub. I went in and Terry was the only one sitting at the bar with a row of martinis in front of him. I asked him what was wrong, and he said, “Mason died two weeks ago. I just found out about it today.” I sat with him in silence while he downed every last drink in honor of his once dear friend. Around the time of the lawsuit in 1975, we had a new boarder: Nile, now 15, came to live with us. Terry wanted him to go to a school in “the country.” I had no qualms about having Nile live with us as he was a sweet, quiet kid who kept to himself. It was agreed that he’d spend weekdays with us and go to his mother’s on the weekend. After visiting the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, but being turned off by the fact that the students were required to go to the chapel every morning, Terry enrolled his son in the Berkshire School just across the state line in Massachusetts as a day student, which meant that I had to drive him to classes every morning in my ancient car and pick him up in the afternoon.

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Most people think having a teenager descend on you would be maddening. Nile was never any trouble around the farm. He had a bedroom downstairs where Terry set up a Movieola and a terrarium, which is the land version of an aquarium. It had snakes, which at one point seemed to be all tied up in a knot in a corner of the tank. Soon there were dozens of tiny snakes crawling all around and I had to put my dainty foot down. If I remember correctly, Terry was writing a screenplay called A Feast of Snakes and had befriended a local rattlesnake rustler who tended to drop in unannounced. This was all quite perplexing for me. Nile was a really good kid and Terry loved having him live with us. The only time I recall that Nile ever raised his voice to me is when I suggested that his proposal to get into a film class was too long and should be only one page. Terry encouraged Nile to have a skill like being a cameraman because it was a well-paid, steady but still creative occupation. Nile always spent Christmas Day with his mother and I’d serve a holiday meal on the following day (I learned to cook a goose, figuring that he had already had enough turkey). Surprisingly, since he was not a religious man, Terry loved Christmas and was very generous when buying gifts, though I don’t recall him giving presents to anyone but me. He loved our Christmas tree so, but, in typical Terry fashion, I was the one who put it up, decorated it, and then took it down. On the Christmas that Nile turned sixteen, I bought an Austin Healy Sprite for $400 from some kid in the village of Canaan. There had been a blizzard and snow drifts all around when Terry and I went to get the tiny car, which needed extensive restoration. Soon Nile was driving the Austin Healy to school with a pair of skis on the back, and I was absolved of that duty. His mother moved to an apartment on Central Park West with her beau and we didn’t have to pay her rent any more, which was a big relief. For Nile’s senior year of high school, his mother decided he should go to the Choate School as a boarder, so we drove him there in September and dropped him off. In the late Seventies, farmer Terry showed up with three black lambs. They joined the Biblical sheep in the orchard. It turned out one of them was a ram, which we named “Ramkin,” and the two other sheep were soon pregnant, always with twins. They multiplied so fast, and the newborns always seemed to come during a March blizzard when I was alone. I would have to walk a long ways backward through the snow, holding the infant lambs in my arms in front of me to the crib. The mother would follow me, sniffing her babies. They were small and fluffy, but they were all muscle. The crib was full of fresh hay, and partitioned off for mothers and children. Ramkin had his own room, fenced off from the others. I had to find a shepherd to

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help with the shearing, and was knitting sweaters and scarves as fast as possible. Soon a romance blossomed on the farm. Ramkin fell in love with me. The feeling wasn’t mutual. He would lean against me and gaze up at me adoringly. If he were on the other side of the fence he would playfully run at tremendous speed with his head bent low, coming at me at about midthigh. I would leap over the fence and land in demi plie on the other side, having done a half-turn because that damn ram was huge and could easily have hurt me though not intentionally. Ramkin would be very surprised at this, and look at me with admiration. This went on for a long time. In order to feed the ewes and lambs inside the crib while avoiding Ramkin, I had to scale the walls like Spider-Man and walk along some beams to get to them, while Ramkin watched astounded. I was quite surprised myself. One day in March, with about four feet of snow on the ground, Terry came back from LA. I told him of my problem with Ramkin and how I thought he could break my leg. He said, “Don’t be silly. Just hit him upside the head with a board.” I said, “Show me.” Grabbing a piece of plywood, we went inside the fence and Ramkin was on the other side. The ram saw me and took off, heading straight for us. I went into my “Tour en L’air,” but Terry was faster than me, and was over the fence before I landed. I had never seen him move that quickly. Ramkin and I both stared at him with wonder. The next time “Mister Know-It-All” came back from LA he brought me a toy water pistol which was supposed to solve all my problems with the ram. It looked like an Uzi, but was made of black plastic, and children played with it. It wasn’t reliable as it always jammed and once again I had to hightail it over the fence to escape the amorous advances of Ramkin.

My persistent suitor Ramkin as a baby and then full grown.

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By the end of the decade, I had finally sold all seventeen sheep to some guy in Vermont, but they didn’t want Ramkin for obvious reasons. I called the butcher, and two of them came in a pickup truck to get him. They let down the ramp at the back of the truck and went to get Ramkin, but when they saw him they wouldn’t go through the gate. Ramkin knew something was up, but he trusted me. I found a small stick, not more than a twig, and said, “Come, Ramkin.” He trotted slowly over to me. I moved back and he followed me. I waved the twig and said, “Up, Ramkin,” and he trotted up the ramp. These guys were dumbstruck. They quickly closed up the truck and drove away. The next time I saw Ramkin, he was shish kabob. I realized then I was a real farmer as the animals had no sentimental value to me. I didn’t consider them pets, only livestock to be raised for food or some other commodity.

10. Hollywood Shuffle Many people wiser than me have speculated on why Terry, who was hailed as “one of the greatest satirists of all-time” had such a rough go of it in the Seventies and Eighties. My perspective is this: At the height of Terry’s fame during the Sixties, he was financially secure and could pick and choose the projects he wished to work on. He loved collaborating and adapting other writers’ works, and he would select projects that truly interested him. He was full of original ideas too, as exemplified by Easy Rider, which revolutionized the movie industry. His troubles began when the novel Candy was deemed pornographic and banned. This brought him to the attention of the FBI, who began keeping a file on his actions and whereabouts. So powerful was Terry’s pen that some felt it had to be silenced. Some senator (and obviously not a fan) remarked, “Satire brings down governments” in specific reference to Terry’s writings. His acute financial woes began in the early Seventies and for the most part prevented him from taking the time to leisurely write a script from an original idea he had. Desperate to make a buck to support two households, he had no choice but to make it known that he was a “writer for hire.” Anybody from producer-wannabes to his friends to total strangers would track him down and commission him to write a script, usually based on some novel. He got paid anywhere between $2,000 and $30,000. Sometimes he’d get screwed and not receive a penny for his time. The process would begin when he’d get a phone call from Hollywood but sometimes the more adventurous types would want to meet with him in person. They’d drive into town and usually get lost trying to find the farm. They’d invariably wind up asking for directions from the local liquor store. People who knew Terry assumed he would have a relationship with the proprietor of an alcoholic beverage business. And unfortunately they were right! A few of these scripts (A Cool Million, Blue Movie, Tough City, Grossing Out) had real potential but due to circumstance and Hollywood machinations never reached the big screen. Others were a complete waste of Terry’s time and he knew it but money was money. This I believe caused the most harm to his reputation as the years passed. Coupled with his alcohol abuse and exaggerated stories of excessive drug use, Terry fell deeper and deeper 162

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into the abyss as far as the Hollywood establishment was concerned. The few chances he really had to redeem himself (i.e., writing for Saturday Night Live; co-writing the Whoopi Goldberg comedy The Telephone) were major disappointments and further damaged him. Terry would write compulsively and be secretive about his work; there were lots of times I never knew what he was working on. When I see a list of screenplays attributed to him during this period, I have no idea what some of them were about or when he wrote them. But there are a few with some very interesting stories behind them. It seemed that every time I turned around, Terry was packing his suitcase and jetting off to Hollywood or I was driving him into New York City. We were barely settled at the farm when Michael Parks showed up one day. He was one of our first houseguests. He and Terry were eager to work together and had discussed an idea for a screenplay. In the spring of 1970 we headed back to California to meet again with Michael. He had been acting since the early Sixties but was red hot in the industry due to his new TV series Then Came Bronson where he played a discontented young man traveling the countryside on a motorcycle trying to find meaning in his life. It was so obviously a knock-off of Easy Rider but it was well-done and very popular with younger viewers. I didn’t watch much television but I remember one episode where Michael’s character meets an American Indian and tells him that he looked like the guy on the buffalo nickel. I adored Michael, who I thought was a marvelous actor, and did not begrudge him any success. Michael and his lovely wife Kay lived in Ojai, California, a small oasis a few hours drive north of Los Angeles. We were put up in a small cottage— more of a shack, actually. The strangest thing happened to us there. A pigeon arrived on our windowsill and fell in love with Terry. The first day she landed and began banging on the window with her beak. I was afraid she would injure herself so I let her in. She flew around for a bit before landing on Terry’s shoulder, cooing and kissing his ear. It was so odd. We figured she must have been somebody’s lost pet. This crazy bird would sit for hours on the rustic lamp hanging over the kitchen table, watching contently while Terry wrote below. William Claxton came over one day and was so intrigued by this “love affair” that he took some marvelous snapshots, one of which was used by Terry as a promotional photo on the back of one of his novels. The poor bird must have pined away for days after Terry left for home. Unfortunately this was the only interesting story to come from this visit. A suitable script for Parks never came to be. Also during this period, Terry was working on an adaptation of Nathanael West’s novel A Cool Million with director Jerry Schatzberg, a celebrated portrait and fashion photographer during the Sixties. He just had a

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critical hit with the junkie drama The Panic in Needle Park with Al Pacino. West’s novel, published in 1934, was a satire of “the Horatio Alger myth of success.” The book’s hero, Lemuel Pitkin, is an optimistic but gullible ordinary Joe who “gets robbed, cheated, unjustly arrested, frequently beaten and exploited.” His abused girlfriend Betty fares no better and winds up sold into prostitution. After he dies, Pitkin’s name is exploited by a Nationalist Party and in death he becomes famous. This was great satirical stuff and just up Terry’s alley. He was such an admirer of West’s work and always wanted to adapt one of his novels. Terry worked long and hard on this screenplay. Jerry was living in a stately townhouse on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, a few blocks from Sherman Square, the real “Needle Park,” on Broadway and West 72nd Street. Terry and I would come in from the farm and stay at the nearby apartment of Terry’s friend Tony Goodstone, a would-be actor and screenwriter who was also a toy collector. He let us crash at his place while he was away. The small apartment, which looked like he had lived there forever, was choc-a-block crammed with all kinds of toys—dolls, trains, airplanes, you name it. It was a nightmare and I thought I had entered Geppetto’s toy shop. Imagine trying to sleep with all these eyes staring at you. I accompanied Terry to Jerry’s apartment to deliver the finished screenplay. Jerry was a wonderful guy and eager to work with Terry. He was very pleased with it and really felt it had a chance to become a movie, so much so that he began batting around actor names for the role of Lemuel. Timothy Bottoms, who was hot at the time after appearing in The Last Picture Show, was considered the top contender. Jerry was able to get his thengirlfriend Faye Dunaway, who won international fame due to her Academy Award–nominated performance in Bonnie and Clyde and starred in Jerry’s first movie Puzzle of a Downfall Child, to agree to star even though Terry felt she was miscast. But in Hollywood, you have to play that game to get financing. If having a big movie star attached to your project, even if he or she is totally wrong for the part, is what’s needed to create interest, that’s what you have to do. Terry believed Faye knew she wasn’t right for the role but she good-naturedly let Jerry use her name. In the end it didn’t matter because he wasn’t able to get any studio to finance the film. While on the Rolling Stones tour, Terry became friendly with the Stones’ stage designer Chip Monck (“if indeed that was his name,” as Terry used to joke). He had previously been the MC and lighting designer for the 1969 Woodstock Festival and had worked on many other big-name concert events. Chip called the farm and wanted to meet with Terry in New York City because he had an idea for a screenplay. Desperately in need of money, we got into the car and drove down. We met him and his friend at the Ginger Man in Lincoln Center and we all sat at the bar. Chip discussed his thoughts about

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his script and, intrigued, Terry asked how much he was willing to pay. Chip replied, “$250 a week.” Terry “hrrumpf”ed and said, “Come on, Gail.” It was like a curtain dropped as we abruptly departed. We were out on the sidewalk before poor Chip could even say another word. Despite the girth he had put on in the past few years, Terry could still move fast like a boxer in the squared circle. According to Chip, I was a bit “up myself” with the success of the tour, and the technical achievements we managed. We were but a crew of five, and with the local Union labor count of ten at each location, as supplied by the local promoter, we felt very accomplished. That, obviously, caused me to solicit Terry’s interest, and hopefully that offer was not an insult to him. Truthfully, I knew nothing about the fee structure, or deals, that were appropriate in those days, so it probably was just that, an insult.

Around the same time, a producer with hopes of casting Mick Jagger in the role of a knight commissioned Terry to adapt a Roger Rosenberg story titled Merlin (based on the King Arthur legend) into a screenplay. Terry readily accepted because he loved the idea of writing this with Mick in mind. He was very proud of his finished screenplay but unfortunately, this was another script that was never produced and I have no idea if Mick even knew about it. One night during the middle of an incredible blizzard, there was a knock on the door. I opened it, and there in the driving snow was a giant of a man who spoke almost no English. He had a book under his arm so I hesitantly invited him in. He introduced himself as Ingmar Ejve from Norway. He was a film director and the book he was carrying, The Hunters of Karin Hall by Carl-Henning Wijkmark, was about Nazi leader Hermann Göring’s country retreat called Karinhall (named for his Swedish wife) where Adolf Hitler paid many a visit. He explained that the beautiful residence was dynamited under Göring’s orders so it would not fall into the hands of the advancing Red Army. He and Terry sat talking for hours in front of a blazing fire. The giant Norwegian then disappeared into the stormy night. Terry would over time write the screenplay adaptation of The Hunters of Karin Hall. However, he turned it into a comedy. Unfortunately, the studios weren’t interested because they said there is nothing funny about Nazi Germany. Terry would reply, “What about the TV show Hogan’s Heroes? That ran for years.” There was a producing team that wanted to make it into a film but when we met them in New York they were flabbergasted because they weren’t able to get funding for it anywhere. Despite their persistence, Terry’s very funny script was never produced. In 1974, The Loved One’s co-producer John Calley was now working at Warner Bros. He loved Terry’s book Blue Movie and wanted to make a movie

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of it but with actors having actual sex. This was around the time of Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door when X-rated movies were a novelty and making millions at the box office. John knew this and, being a really hip guy, thought he could pull off a big budgeted all-star X-rated romp. Other producers at various times were interested in turning Blue Movie into a film but with simulated sex scenes. John kept telling Terry that the movie “would be like Gone with the Wind” and would earn millions at the box office. Calley was living with Julie Andrews and supposedly convinced her, though I find it hard to believe, to play sexpot Angela Sterling. Reading the novel, I was thinking of Raquel Welch or Ann-Margret for this role and not Mary Poppins. I think the fact that John was able to get the esteemed Mike Nichols to agree to direct helped Andrews with her decision as it did the studio, which purportedly was putting up a budget of $14 million. Terry’s friend Ringo Starr had an option on the book and was ready to step aside to let the movie be made when his lawyer objected. He demanded that Ringo retain an interest in the movie or he’d look foolish amongst his Hollywood peers if it became a big hit and his client didn’t receive a penny. John and Terry agreed to give Ringo a piece of the action but Nichols balked because he felt that he needed those points to sway major actors to participate. Terry also said Nichols had a “superstition about allowing other people as part of his projects.” With all the talk of points and profit-sharing, I felt like Easy Rider had come back to haunt me. Everybody dug in their heels and wouldn’t compromise so naturally the deal fell apart. Ringo could have called off his lawyer but for some reason never did. Terry had already written the screenplay and of all his scripts from this period he always said Blue Movie was as close to getting a movie produced as you can come without it becoming a reality. Throughout the years, some filmmaker would contact Terry about doing a movie version of Blue Movie. Marc Toberoff is the latest producer to give it a try. Considering some of his previous movies (such “classics” as Zombie High, My Favorite Martian, and I Spy), I have very little confidence that it will be true to Terry’s satiric vision and hope it is never completed. With all Blue Movie prospects dead, Terry hid his disappointment and went on to his next assignment as was his style. He accepted his friend Si Litvinoff’s offer to come to New Mexico to cover the making of his new movie The Man Who Fell to Earth. Si knew Terry had good relationships with many magazine editors, especially at Esquire, and he thought Terry could interview the actors for a story to generate publicity for the movie. Si was paying all of Terry’s expenses and a number of his friends were in the cast including Rip Torn and agent Peter Witt. Deciding to make a minivacation out of it, he took young Nile along with him. Jim Lovell, com-

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mander of Apollo 13, was also in the movie playing himself and Terry thought, what other chance would he ever have to introduce his son to a reallife astronaut? The Man Who Fell to Earth was based on the novel by Walter Tevis, who wrote The Hustler, and was being directed by Nicolas Roeg. David Bowie starred as an alien whose desperate mission is to take water from Earth to save his dying planet. Using his advanced technological skills, he forms a company to earn the billions he will need to build a spacecraft to get back to his planet. His plans go awry when he falls in love with a girl and has to deal with greedy, unscrupulous businessmen. Candy Clark of American Graffiti fame played the girl and Rip Torn played a jaded science professor who quits his job to help Bowie with his new company. While Terry was on the set, Nicolas Roeg had an idea and cast him as a reporter at the space launch who interviews Lovell playing himself. Terry never published any written interviews with the cast but Si had no regrets about footing his friend’s travel bill since he was just happy to be able to provide a fun time for Terry. Si recalls one on-set incident: There was supposed to be a scene in the very tight quarters of the space capsule between Bowie and Rip Torn, who had only just arrived in New Mexico and was wired and pacing like a caged lion. David had earlier promised me

Nicolas Roeg and Si Litvinoff, ca. 2008. Courtesy Si Litvinoff.

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Trippin’ with Terry Southern that he would not do any drugs during filming. He was up late every night learning his lines for the next day and composing the musical score for the film. He was dead on his feet as much as Rip was raging! After many disastrous takes we took a break and I sent for a bottle of tequila for Rip to calm him down. Knowing that David had trouble swallowing pills, I sent for and ground up No-Doz for him to snort to wake up. It worked but the studio heads came in and fussed for a time thinking it was cocaine. Terry enjoyed this story.

When Terry returned home he shared with me the tale of his fishing adventure with Rip and Nile. Rip drove them to a river deep into the desert. Terry was very impressed with Rip’s outdoor skills as he caught some fish, scaled them, built a fire, and then cooked dinner. Terry hoped Rip’s adventuresome ways would inspire Nile but I don’t think his city slicker son was interested in the least. From 1975 to 1977 Terry seemed to be going back and forth to Hollywood more than usual. Returning from one of his many excursions, he remarked, “I was so embarrassed. Someone at this party played a new recording by this singer and asked me what I thought. I said it was the worst thing I had ever heard. Then I found out the guy who sang it was there!” It was pop singer and songwriter Harry Nilsson, who had a huge hit in 1969 with the Grammy Award–winning “Everybody’s Talkin’” from the movie Midnight Cowboy. He also penned the hit song “One” for Three Dog Night and wrote a few TV theme songs including the popular “Best Friend,” which he also performed, from The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. Curiously, Harry never sang in public in front of an audience and only recorded. It was understandable to me why Terry disliked his records at first. I guess his singing style would be called molto legato. He could really slide around a note, eventually hitting it. Terry was used to jazz and be-bop from his era. But always open to new things, Terry grew to appreciate Nilsson’s recordings. He had a great ear for music, voices, and dialogue. For example, he could always identify James Coburn in voiceovers no matter how the actor tried to disguise his voice. Terry would say, “Did you hear that? That’s Coburn.” I accompanied Terry to Hollywood on his next trip. He was meeting with a producer named Gene Taft to discuss a screenplay idea. Taft put us up at the Chateau Marmont, which at this time was still rundown and not a fashionable place to stay. Our suite was comfortable, and the rotating cowgirl was right outside our window. We were there for about three weeks and Terry had almost finished work on the script. One afternoon, actor Michael Parks stopped by to visit. He and Terry were talking when Taft showed up. He became irate, and accused Terry of working with Michael on another project on his time. He took this as an opportunity to get out of paying Terry,

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who had to file a grievance against him with the Writers Guild to get his money. Terry’s case was handled by Naomi Gurian, the Guild’s associate resident counsel, who later went on to become its executive director. Terry provided proof that the Parks project for TV (Woody a.k.a. On the Loose for Brut Productions) fell into two separate time periods due to the company’s situation with the interested network NBC. All parties involved including Parks, William Claxton who was slated to direct, and the typist who worked for Terry promised to give sworn affidavits or testimony. This was one lawsuit Terry was bound and determined to win though he continued to be scattered in his dealings with Ms. Gurian. For instance, she asked him to write her with answers to a couple of questions and he soon began getting worried when he never heard back. Due to his typical absentmindedness when it came to business, it was because he dropped the letter underneath the front seat of his car and never mailed it! When he composed a second letter to her, he apologized and glibly hoped he could “attempt to re-option.” Ms. Gurian was patient with her always careless client and pursued the case against Taft. We were elated that she prevailed and Terry was paid the money owed him. The case made the newspapers and there was an American producer in London who would say to Terry whenever he saw him, “I never stiffed a writer, I never stiffed a writer.” Gene Taft should have heeded his advice. In August 1977, I went with Terry once again to Los Angeles. He was meeting with Michael Parks again as they were determined to work together on a movie project. While they met, I learned that my former agent Sam Armstrong had passed away. I went over to his agency to give my condolences to his business partner Lou Deuser. We had a lovely chat and he said to me, “You broke Sam’s heart.” Sam had a lot of confidence in my talent but I disappointed him and, like his client Luise Rainer, I ran off with a writer. Lou liked me too and offered to represent me again if I stayed in LA. I politely declined as I had no interest in resurrecting my acting career. When I got back to the hotel, I told Terry that Lou said I broke Sam’s heart. Terry drolly quipped, “Agents don’t have hearts.” We spent a lot of time on this trip visiting with George and Marion Segal. It seemed that stardom went to George’s head and he’d had a meltdown months earlier. He was eager to share with us stories about his bad behavior. He explained that on movie sets everyone treats him like a superstar but at home he is ignored by his family. This caused him great angst and the littlest things would set him off, such as finding tinted wine glasses in the cupboard. He would throw them across the room shouting, “You don’t drink wine from colored glasses!” After filling our crystal-clear wine glasses, George took us upstairs to a

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sitting room (with some furniture I recognized from their New York apartment) while gleefully continuing with his bizarre tale. He then explained, with Marion interjecting with her role as it happened, how when everyone was asleep one night he shimmied down a drainpipe and walked all the way to LAX Airport having decided that he didn’t want to be a movie star any more if he couldn’t get any respect at home. He planned to return to New York and called his brother in New Jersey telling him about his plan to become just another anonymous person. Marion then jumped in and told us that after realizing he had disappeared, she filed a missing persons report and the cops came to the house where they inspected the drainpipe. She noticed a shoebox lid with a scattering of marijuana on the sofa and nonchalantly pirouetted to it, spreading her pleated-skirt as she sat on top of it while smiling at the cops the whole time. George’s brother convinced him to go home and confront his problems. George and Marion were just so amused with this story but I was left dumbfounded about George’s erratic behavior. On another trip later that year I finally met Harry Nilsson. Despite what Terry said about his singing on his earlier visit, the two hit it off when introduced. Unfortunately, this friendship would turn out to be disastrous for Terry. We visited Harry and his new wife, the former Una O’Keefe, at his home high up in the Hollywood Hills just above Sunset Boulevard. It was the strangest house I had ever seen. Built entirely of beige stone, it looked like a bunker, and hung precariously off the edge of a cliff. One entered into a long hallway and the first thing seen on the right was a bathroom and a small kitchen. Continuing down the hallway, you finally entered the sunken living room decorated, in the fashion of the time, with oversize pillows and wall-to-wall synthetic carpeting. Off the living room was a porch with no railings. It was a great place for small, rambunctious children and stumbling drunks to fall off into the canyon below. And in Harry’s house there were to be plenty of both. Harry had an insatiable appetite for food, alcohol and drugs, and would push people to overindulge with him. One of course would be Terry. Harry also had a fear of being alone and loved to surround himself with people. I think if he could, Harry would have hung out in bars for the rest of his life. He had enough money to do it and sort of gave it a try. I sensed something distasteful about Harry the moment I met him. Privately, his personality was quite different than his public persona as this mellow pop singer. I always felt that Harry seemed to hate women. Terry and I talked about this once and Terry opined, “I think he blamed his mother for his father abandoning them when Harry was a toddler.” There was an unspoken dislike between Harry and me. Whenever I would accompany Terry to Harry’s, he’d snidely say to me, “Oh, you came too?” I always drove Terry

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and Harry knew that, but it was his way of letting me know that I wasn’t wanted. Once in a swanky, brightly lit Beverly Hills restaurant, Harry dipped his long pinky fingernail into some cocaine and shoved it right under my nose. Taken aback, I sneezed and it went all over the table. Harry was not too pleased with me but I couldn’t have cared less. Despite what I thought of Harry, Terry saw a creative spark through the madness and he and Harry became close friends. No surprise there as Terry was always drawn to these types of personalities (for instance, Dennis Hopper). Harry would check into a posh New York City hotel, order room service, and sit around all day in his bathrobe. He would end up with quite a collection of the hotel’s trays and dirty plates, because he never allowed them to be taken away. His room would always have a grand piano though he couldn’t play it. Terry would join him, trying unsuccessfully to focus Harry’s creative energy into a concrete project. They hung out together for days, sleeping all morning and afternoon, I imagine like beached whales, and carousing all night. They were too drunk to be womanizers. Harry was just goofing off—he had the wealth to do that—but Terry’s intent was to pull something together with Harry to make some money. Terry lacked the forceful personality to get the singer to concentrate and take their collaboration seriously so in the end he always got sucked into Harry’s partying lifestyle. They were a bad influence on each other right until the mid–Eighties when Harry finally got serious. When not hanging out with Harry, Terry began writing with Joe LoGuidice, a former art dealer turned screenwriter and filmmaker. They met during the 1968 Democratic Convention. Joe owned one of the first lofts in New York City’s meat packing district, eons before it became the fashionable place to live. They co-wrote about six screenplays including the one I thought was the most interesting, Tough City, which was set in crime-ridden, corrupt, financially strapped New York City during the mid–Seventies. The lead character was Ruby West, a divorcee with a ten-year-old son, and owner of “Tough City Tours,” a very successful double-decker tour bus business. As usual, Terry was ahead of the times as this was years before the city streets became riddled with them. Ruby, with her Puerto Rican assistant Mario, exploited the city’s woes with outrageous ads to attract tourists to see the city’s underbelly. The spunky tour guide’s popularity makes her kind of a folk hero for the city’s downtrodden residents who appeal to her for help when they feel they are being taken advantage of. Her notoriety brings her to the attention of the thought-to-be-dead Mr. Huge, a reclusive millionaire a la Howard Hughes (complete with a germ phobia), who recruits her to run for mayor as a third party reform candidate whose platform calls for the city to secede from New York State. Tough City was a satirical, off-the-wall piece

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of urban life that I thought had real potential to make it to the big screen. Unfortunately, they were never able to sell the rights. Remembering Terry, Joe opined fondly, I can think of many hilarious moments with Terry in the years we wrote together. But what I remember most is his addiction to writing—in the car as Gail drove; watching TV; just hanging out—he always had a pad and pencil at hand. I miss Terry and was privileged to have worked with him.

One day while Terry and Joe were writing away at the loft, Abbie Hoffman called. He was in hiding after skipping bail on a drug charge and was living under the name of “Barry Freed.” Terry was amazed that Abbie would be so fearless and contact Joe but he had heard about the upcoming benefit

The satirical promotional ad used by the bus company Tough City Tours, from the screenplay Tough City by Joe LoGuidice and Terry. Courtesy Joe LoGuidice.

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for him. Terry acted as master of ceremonies and wrote a play with Joe LoGuidice called “Havan Can’t Wait” specifically for the cause. It was later performed at an ornate Jewish Theatre on Second Avenue with William Kunstler playing a lawyer. Terry was such a wonderful emcee. He kept telling the audience that Keith Richards would soon make an appearance and then rush backstage where I was watching from the wings and tell me nervously, “If he doesn’t show up, the audience will mutiny!” Richards was a no-show but luckily Frank Zappa appeared and closed the show to enthusiastic applause. He was a success and Terry was saved. Another dear friend that Terry wanted desperately to work with, but never quite managed to get a project going, was William Burroughs. They did come close twice. The first try was around this time. Chuck Barris, who produced and hosted The Gong Show, wanted to branch out of the game show business and make movies, specifically what Terry called “quality lit.” Barris was interested in doing the movie version of Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch so he flew Terry and Bill out to Los Angeles first class to discuss the screenplay. They were met at the airport by a limo and put up in one of LA’s most swanky hotels where they were told to wait until someone contacted them. Several days passed without a word from the studio so they spent their time ordering room service and drinking at the hotel’s downstairs bar where I am sure they had some deep conversations. Finally, a call came. They were

Joe LoGuidice, and Terry, ca. 1977.

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told that Mr. Barris had just completed reading Naked Lunch and that “he was nauseated and disgusted by it. There would be no film—goodbye.” Terry and Bill were dumbstruck that a producer would option a book without reading it first. Worse, they now found themselves stranded in this expensive hotel with no money and no way to get to the airport. They finally convinced some poor kindhearted soul with an old Volkswagen to drive them. After they got their luggage into the tiny automobile, there was no room for two grown men to fit so Terry had to sit on the openly gay Burroughs’ lap the whole drive to LAX. And to add insult to injury, the tickets waiting for them at the airline counter were downgraded to coach. A second ill-fated Southern-Burroughs screenplay was the adaptation of Burroughs’ novel Junkie. It was reissued in the Seventies and found a whole new audience. Jacques Stern, a well-known physicist also known as Baron Rothschild, was a longtime friend of Burroughs. He had enough money to option the book and finance a first draft of a script even though they had a tense relationship as Stern blamed Burroughs for his not winning a Nobel Prize. Seems Burroughs used to let people think that Stern was on dope. Through Jean Stein, Stern became partners with Dennis Hopper, who was going to direct and star as the lead drug-addicted character Bill Lee. Dennis kept promising Terry that he was going to get his fair share from this to make up for Easy Rider. Finally a deal was closed in February 1977 by some high-powered Yale lawyers representing Stern’s production company Automatique, Ltd. Terry was to receive $20,000 for a first draft screenplay and $45,000 once principal photography began plus three percent of net profits. We had a celebratory dinner at the Algonquin. I was the only woman there amongst about nine men and as the waiter pulled out my chair he brazenly whispered in my ear, “The odds look good tonight, madam.” Afterwards there was a party at Jean Stein’s but Dennis was nowhere to be found. It was rumored that he was doing some research for the role of a junkie, which I found funny since he had been practicing for this role all his life I thought. Someone went to the bathroom and sure enough there was Dennis out cold on the floor, wedged between the sink and the toilet with a silly grin on his face. Perfect casting in my mind. Jacques put us up at the Gramercy Park Hotel on East 20th Street so Terry could begin working with Burroughs, who lived not too far away. Stern had been ill in his youth and was paralyzed, leaving him wheelchair-bound. In constant pain, he had a hypodermic needle in his wrist that he could tap at will to get a fix of cocaine and heroin. Terry and especially Burroughs were quite envious, of course. Terry would ask Jacques if his first language was French and he would respond emphatically, “No, it is mathematics!” He

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lived in a brownstone on the other side of the park and I would watch him zoom up and down the sidewalk in his motorized wheelchair. Burroughs would come to the hotel, look out the window in a bewildered way at the joggers running around the park and remark insistently, “I think they have developed a new kind of dope drop.” Despite the fanfare, the movie never came to be. Terry felt that Hopper wasn’t really interested in this and only wanted to get high. Stern wasn’t able to get over his issues with Burroughs, who with Terry completed a first draft screenplay. However a final script was never produced. Instead of getting depressed about it, Terry went clubbing! In 1977, a nightclub called Studio 54 opened in New York City during the height of the disco craze and quickly became the hip place to be seen. Celebrities such as Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Truman Capote, Cher and others could be found boogie-ing the night away. Believe it or not, Terry and I were frequent visitors despite the fact that we stayed as far from the dance floor as possible. We never had to wait in line and the velvet ropes immediately parted to allow us through. Over a twoyear period we must have gone there over two dozen times. Terry just loved it. All those stoned people behaving badly—he was in his glory! But to me it was just a fire trap and I hated it! It had once been a classic old theatre that had been gutted. The orchestra seats had been ripped out, turning the space into a dance floor packed with gyrating people, deafening sound, and blinding strobe lights that could give anyone an epileptic fit. The lighting booth had been removed and was now a VIP lounge where Terry and I would spend our time drinking away the hours. To reach the celebrity-laden lounge, you had to climb the stairs of what used to be the balcony. It was pitch black and packed with people. I guess it was so dark so you couldn’t see all the cocaine being snorted up some very famous noses including Terry’s. I always stumbled and fell up the stairs flat on my face. I would gingerly pick myself up and keep climbing, trying to catch up with Terry and whoever was with us on a particular night. While Terry would get comfortable sitting in one place regaling everyone around him with stories about himself or in deep discussion about “quality lit” with Mick Jagger or someone of that ilk, I sat nervously eyeing the exits, just knowing those fire doors were locked. Knowing that I would have to drive home, I also passed on the toot and the booze that was flowing like water. All I wanted was to be home in my bed and not watching famous people making fools out of themselves. But since I knew how much Terry liked being there, I put on a brave face and tried to enjoy myself. One night the club’s owner Steve Rubell invited us to his plush office for a private party but to get there we had to trek down the steep balcony

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stairs and thread our way through the maze of wriggling, half-naked people on the packed dance floor. Feeling dizzy from the flashing lights and blasting music, I almost passed out but eventually made it to our destination in one piece. Terry loved Studio 54 so much that he dragged me there one New Year’s Eve. We started off late and I drove all the way in. I couldn’t believe that anyone in their right mind would drive two hundred miles to go to a party, but it seems like I did this almost weekly as I didn’t want to disappoint Terry, who hated the thought of missing out on some revelry. I drove back and forth to the city for almost twenty-five years. Sometimes, more than I care to remember, we were the only car on the road between Canaan and New York. Why did I do this for so long? When I pulled up to the disco that New Year’s Eve, I just couldn’t bear the thought of spending my holiday with those coked-up weirdos. I told Terry I would just wait in the car for a while. I had no intention of going in and had a nice four-hour nap. When Terry emerged after his revelry, he knocked on the window of the locked car and woke me up. Terry was concerned about me in his own way but not concerned enough to leave the party to come see what happened to me. I drove back to the farm nice and refreshed with Terry sound asleep in the back seat holding his New Year’s paper horn. Thank God the Feds closed Studio 54 in early 1980 and I never had to set foot in it again. Man cannot survive on disco-ing alone and Terry needed work. As luck would have it, Peter Sellers re-entered Terry’s life in 1979. He telephoned out of the blue one day and told Terry that he had a new project for him to work on. Peter bought the rights to Anthony Sampson’s non-fiction book The Arms Bazaar, which was about international arms dealing. He wanted Terry to adapt it into a black comedy. As Peter told Terry, his interest in the subject began when en route via private plane (with Princess Margaret and other dignitaries) to a wedding. He sat beside a gentleman of indeterminate nationality wearing an impeccably tailored jacket made of shiny material. Noticing that Peter was staring at his clothes, the man revealed that it was made of bullet-proof fabric and the buttons were formed from the bullets that were shot at it and became wedged in the jacket. He turned out to be an arms dealer and Peter, the obsessive person that he was, followed the guy around for the entire wedding, fascinated with his life as an arms dealer. He then discovered Sampson’s book. Terry signed a contract with Lorimar Productions and was paid $30,000 at the start of writing his first draft and then another $20,000 when he delivered it in, I believe, late 1979. Titling the screenplay Grossing Out, he worked

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diligently on this for four months and was quite proud of his script, which satirized the West selling arms to Third World countries and then exploiting them in the process. It was Terry’s Dr. Strangelove for the post–Vietnam era complete with a buffoonish U.S. of A. general named Wastemoreland. Peter loved the story and especially his character of Kemp, a sales representative for a British security aircraft company who tries to woo the country of Jordan away from his U.S. competitor. Andrew Braunsberg was set to produce and, according to Terry, Hal Ashby expressed interest in directing. All was a go and we celebrated. However, as we were driving to Larry Rivers’ house in the Hamptons the following July, we heard on the car radio that Peter had died suddenly of a massive heart attack. Terry was devastated. With their star now dead, Lorimar pulled the plug on the movie despite Terry’s attempt to keep it alive with George Segal filling in for Sellers. Terry’s bad luck and losing streak continued. In the spring of 1980, I had the honor to meet the esteemed playwright Tennessee Williams. Geraldine Page was starring in his newest Broadway show titled Clothes for a Summer Hotel. She played the institutionalized Zelda Fitzgerald, who is visited by her ex-husband F. Scott Fitzgerald (played by Kenneth Haigh), with flashbacks to their whirlwind marriage during the Twenties. Terry and I were invited to opening night. Because Zelda wanted to be a ballet dancer, Gerry had to take lessons. She would come to our farm house where I had a barre in the attic and she wanted me to watch her do the ballet exercises she learned from her teacher, Anna Sokolov. She was great and I was so impressed watching her on stage because she had to do all these consecutive turns and pulled them off with aplomb. Once the play ended and the cast took their curtain calls, a few of us went back to the elegant Upper East Side apartment of Tennessee’s longtime patron, Maria St. Just. It was quite a home, with antique tapestries hanging on the walls. Gerry was there of course with Rip and her children. Like Terry, Tennessee was very quiet so there was not much conversation between the two. I think Tennessee was distracted and anxious about the reviews. Angelica, Tony, and John were sent out to get the midnight papers. Unfortunately, the play, which I thought was simply wonderful, was savaged by the critics. I looked over and saw the great Tennessee Williams sitting in a chair with tears rolling down his cheeks. The bad reviews, coupled with a springtime blizzard and transit strike, hurt the play immensely and it closed after only fourteen performances. It was to be the last Williams play on Broadway during his lifetime as he passed away just two years later. Around this time, Si Litvinoff, who had been living in LA, contacted Terry. He wanted him to adapt a satirical novel about the classical music business called Aria, written by a man named Brown Meggs, the former chief

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operating officer at Capitol Records who signed The Beatles in 1963 and who was now a full-time novelist. Si had come to know Meggs through their love of fine wine, which led to Si trying unsuccessfully to develop Meggs’ first novel Saturday Games into a movie. Meggs’ third book, Aria, was the amusing story of a record executive hell-bent on releasing the greatest recording ever of Giuseppe’s Verdi’s Othelo before his imminent retirement. Si remarks, I loved this book and its hilarious pitfalls the executive encounters. I wanted this to be the Dr. Strangelove of the classical music business and there was only one man who could write it—Terry.

Of course Terry readily agreed and when Si was able to get their good friend Ted Kotcheff, who was riding high again in Hollywood after having a string of hit movies (Fun with Dick and Jane, Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?, North Dallas Forty), on board to direct, he went to 20th Century–Fox. Si had a good working relationship with the studio and they offered a development deal. Terry was to receive “$30,000 on delivery of the first-draft screenplay; $12,500 on commencement of services on the revisions, and $12,500 on delivery of the revisions.” There was also an option for Terry to write and deliver second revisions for an additional $20,000 and third revisions for an additional $15,000. If the movie was made, there would be a bonus due plus profit participation. Si made sure Terry would be well compensated. Alas it never came to be despite the fact that Aria was a bestseller. Terry departed for Hollywood without me. What happened next is recalled by Si: I was living in Brentwood at the time and Terry came to stay with me and my wife. We put him up in a guest room where he was to finish the script. I remember my wife frequently taking his fogged-up eyeglasses off of him and cleaning them when he would fall asleep while working. I respected Terry too much to ask to see pages and probably so did Ted. That was our mistake. When he was not at the house, Terry was spending time with George Segal whom he was campaigning to play the lead. I later was told that George was having a cocaine problem at the time (and so was most of Hollywood) and perhaps that infiltrated Terry’s screenplay. It wasn’t Dr. Strangelove but more Easy Rider—and not funny! It also did not capture the world of classical music but instead more like the punk scene. I had to submit the script in order for Terry to get his fee [$30,000] and try to get another draft out of him. But Fox quickly put us into turnaround and the project was dropped. It was very disappointing but at least Terry earned some money though he could have gotten a lot more.

Shortly after Terry returned home, George and Marion Segal came to New York and stayed at the Pierre Hotel. We were to meet them and their children at the Russian Tea Room, Terry’s favorite restaurant after Elaine’s.

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I asked if I could bring along my insecure friend Linda Rogoff, a beautiful girl who was alone and unattached. I had met her while Terry was working with a guy named Richard Zakka on a script called Dawn of the Kings, yet another movie project that never came to fruition. He was a gorgeous Persian who was dating Linda at that time. Soon after, he dumped her for a beautiful blonde, which he called “a daffodil.” We met up at the restaurant and a spark was lit between George and Linda right under the oblivious eyes of Marion, who was complaining to me about the price of Perrier Water at the hotel versus what they charged at the local deli. After dinner we all went back to their suite at the Pierre for a nightcap. We stayed for only about an hour because we had a long drive back to the farm and it was late. It seems that the sly Linda had “forgotten her earrings” and had to go back the next afternoon to fetch them. George was alone in the suite because Marion had gone out shopping, probably looking for cheaper Perrier. I too was unaware of George’s attraction to Linda and didn’t know that they began an affair until she called me a few weeks later. I brought Linda to the restaurant never thinking she would break up a marriage. I was only hoping that, by meeting Marion, Linda would regain her confidence as George’s wife was an attractive and self-confident woman. Linda told me that George was so paranoid and guilt-ridden that he would show up for their trysts wearing two overcoats and a hat during the blistering hot days of August. I missed all the drama regarding George’s divorce from Marion and marriage to Linda. It wasn’t until George came to live in Linda’s apartment during 1981 that I got in contact with Linda again. George had become somewhat of a pariah in Hollywood due to his bad choices and worse behavior. To regain his professional respectability, he accepted an offer to go on the road with a play, which took him to Edmonton in the middle of the winter, Toronto, and Houston. It seems like Terry, George was struggling and paying his dues all over again.

11. New York, New York While Terry was shuffling between Hollywood and home, I would go back and forth to New York where I leased a studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. After selling off most of the livestock, I needed a break from our life on the farm. All Terry’s trials and tribulations finally caught up with me. I was literally exhausted. I needed to concentrate on me for awhile and reconnect to the theater world. Friends would ask me why I just didn’t leave Terry. We weren’t married and I could easily have packed up and moved out. But Terry and I had a special loving bond that I believe he never had with any other woman. He was just so wise and helped me grow as a person. For the most part we never made demands of each other and respected one another. We lived a happy life and even in our most dour financial times, or when Terry’s drinking became a problem, our home was full of laughter. Nobody could make me chuckle like Terry. We could just be sitting at home watching the six o’clock news and Terry’s witty observations about what was going on would have me in stitches. He never lost his satirical point of view. Another reason I decided to spend more time in New York was that while at home one day I was knitting socks for Geraldine Page since I had so much wool left from the departed sheep. She coincidentally telephoned me at that moment and said that she would not be coming up to the farm any longer. Her marriage to Rip Torn was rocky, to say the least. She was not happy that Rip had a girlfriend, an actress named Amy Wright, who just gave birth to his daughter. And she felt hurt when she found out that they had all come up to visit us recently. I was saddened but totally understood Gerry’s decision. I was also conflicted as I liked Amy—a lot. Who was I to judge Rip? I maintained friendships with both Gerry and Amy, never letting their relationships with Rip or each other come between us. Amy came to the farm most weekends with Rip for many years. Her beautiful and talented daughter, Katie, was about six months old when I first saw her, and as she grew she had blond hair and brown eyes with olive skin. We would joke that we knew who the father was, but were not sure who the mother was, because she had my coloring, and looked more like me than Amy with her paper-white skin. 180

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As she did in 1967, Gerry once again got me into the Actors Studio as a professional observer. I also took scene classes at John Strasberg’s school, The Real Stage. John was the son of Lee Strasberg and he allowed me to work the front desk in exchange for free tuition. Gerry, who was appearing in the hit Broadway play Agnes of God down the street, stopped by to see me one day. John took her for a walk and explained that he wanted to start a theater company called the Mirror Repertory Company, and would she like to be involved? She did, becoming a charter member and its resident artist. The Off Off-Broadway group gave her the opportunity to play every great role an actress would want in her lifetime. I know because I had the privilege of watching Gerry perform in all these plays in a jewel box of a theater over the course of a few years. The one I remember most was The Madwoman of Chaillot. It was the first play I ever read (I was twelve years old) and was my favorite. Wanting to work with Gerry desperately, F. Murray Abraham stepped in to play the role of the rag picker for two performances only just to share the stage with the great Geraldine Page. She was very happy during this period of time and even confided to me that she was sort of relieved that Rip found somebody new and said, “I’m afraid he’ll come back, Gail, and the gates will close.” Meanwhile, things started to look up for Terry socially and professionally. George Segal bought a house for his new wife Linda near us, at the top

Terry with Linda and George Segal in New York City, ca. 1980.

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Terry’s favorite restaurant in New York City was Elaine’s. Here he is with proprietor Elaine Kaufman and George Segal, ca. 1982.

of Sharon Mountain, so he could hang out with Terry while not working in Hollywood or New York. It was a lovely home and George spared no expense decorating it. They then threw a wonderful housewarming party. We drove home and as we coasted up the driveway we were startled when the doors to our barn flung open. A young man walked out with his hands raised in the air and yelled, “Don’t shoot!” Terry and I looked at each other incredulously. Our trespasser turned out to be a charming Scotsman named Andrew Murray Scott. He was a writer working on a biography of novelist Alexander Trocchi, a friend of Terry’s during his Paris days. Andrew popped in to see if he could interview Terry for his book.* Terry, who was tipsy from drinking at the Segals’, immediately invited the young writer to sit for a spell. As Scott described in his article “My Friend Terry Southern,” He [Terry] looks like a wayward academic. His voice is pure Ronald Fraser or Peter Sellers; clipped, English, sardonic.... We relax on chaise lounges and deep armchairs and begin long rambling conversations; two buddy writers *It wasn’t until recently that I learned that, before Terry and I returned home, Andrew had let himself into our abode. We never locked the doors so he strolled right in. Hunter, our English Setter, and Martha, a fat black Labrador, accompanied him as he aimlessly meandered from room to room— some great watchdogs they turned out to be. Andrew even answered our phone and jauntily bantered with Harry Nilsson and Timothy Leary! A wonderfully witty writer, Andrew has gone on to author a number of books including Alexander Trocchi: The Making of the Monster, The Mushroom Club, and The Big J.

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together. The conversations twist out of focus, spiral out of synch, drop decades, and end suddenly on phrases held aloft like flies in amber.

Terry enjoyed talking about Trocchi so much that he insisted that Andrew spend the night. The next day Terry and Andrew strolled around the grounds with Terry regaling the Scotsman with stories about the house. That evening Rip Torn and Amy Wright descended on us and Terry insisted Andrew had to stay to partake in Rip’s famous pasta putanesca. Andrew and Terry had much in common and Terry loved talking with a fellow writer, especially one who was so knowledgeable about Trocchi. Andrew didn’t leave until a few days later. Meanwhile, Linda and George were so happy and were enjoying the rural life. We had some wonderful times together. Though I felt badly for George’s ex-wife Marion, I was really glad that insecure Linda finally found her Prince Charming—a movie star no less—but she took being Mrs. George Segal to extremes. The old house needed a lot of fixing-up and repairs. When Linda needed a local plumber or handyman, she would inform them that “it was Mrs. George Segal calling,” thinking they would come quicker, which they did, but not realizing that the bill had just tripled. On the working front, in 1981 Michael O’Donoghue was named head writer and supervising producer for the 1981-82 season of Saturday Night Live. Michael knew of Terry’s work from his books and movies and also for his articles that he contributed to National Lampoon magazine beginning in

Terry with our mystery intruder, Andrew Murray Scott, 1981.

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late 1972 when Michael worked there as an editor. He thought Terry would bring a much-needed satirical bent to the ailing sketch comedy series. Terry was excited to get this offer because he was a big fan of the show and watched it religiously. Although Terry loved to collaborate, he was just not prepared for the situation he found himself in. Every day Terry would tell me that the entire writing team, consisting of more than a dozen scribes, would sit around a long table trying to be funny and make each other laugh. Terry’s ideal situation would have been working in separate cubicles and then passing written pages under the door or over the transom. The hours at SNL were punishing and there was so much cocaine around that even Terry was appalled but of course that didn’t stop him from partaking. Writers were always rushing to the bathroom with bloody Kleenex tissues stuffed up their noses. There was only one female on the writing team, the beautiful Rosie Schuster, daughter of Frank Schuster of The Wayne and Schuster Show. In Toronto I had worked with Frank many times. Terry, thinking there needed to be someone else representing the female side on the writing team, tried to get Iris Owens a job. She had written the hilarious books After Claude and Conjuring Up Philip and was a bona fide member of the “Quality Lit Set.” I rarely visited Terry at the Saturday Night Live offices but for some reason I was there that day and Terry sent me out to see if she had shown up. I went into the hallway and said to the guard, “Has the great Iris Owens shown up yet?” She was walking down the corridor at that exact moment and overheard me. Though I had met her a few times at George Plimpton’s parties, I gushed and told her how much I had enjoyed her work. She thanked me and I led her to Terry. To his disappointment, she didn’t get the job. He was hoping to have at least one person on the writing staff that he could relate to. Terry had high regard for women because he felt they were the custodians of the culture coming into the home—choosing for their families what books to read, movies to go see, and TV shows to watch. The SNL work environment was not ideal for Terry to create, so many of his sketch ideas were rejected. He just didn’t fit in with these younger guys with their egos always trying to one-up each other, and couldn’t get in the mindset to work with them. However, the producers liked the quirky celebrity guest stars—all friends of Terry’s—that he convinced to come on the show. In 1982, James Coburn hosted the February 2 show, and Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, and Ringo Starr made cameo appearances throughout the season. That December and for a couple of years after, we were invited and attended O’Donoghue’s Christmas parties at his nifty apartment in Chelsea.

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Terry adored Rosie Schuster, the only female writer during his tenure on Saturday Night Live. That’s artist John Alexander sitting between them, 1982.

He had an entire wall of glass-enclosed bookcases filled with his collection of Barbie and Ken dolls twisted into sexual positions. His parties were always jam-packed. I do remember meeting a young up-and-coming comic from the show who was introduced to me by Terry. The cute man’s name was Eddie Murphy. Of course, I just thought he was another struggling comedian and didn’t pay much attention to him. O’Donoghue was either fired by NBC or quit, purportedly due to a sketch NBC found offensive comparing the network and its then president Fred Silverman to Nazis and Adolf Hitler. Sets had been built but the sketch was scratched before it went any further and Michael was out. Terry lasted until the end of the season, I suspect because he got all those famous people to appear on the show. However, he was not asked to return in the fall. The one staff writer Terry hit it off with was Nelson Lyon. He was an outrageous character to whom Terry was immediately attracted. Terry wrote a sketch for him and Nelson appeared on TV coast-to-coast despite an arrest warrant for him in LA. He had been partying with actor John Belushi on the night he died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont and was wanted for questioning. The fact that Nelson would take such a risk just to make his sketch funny pleased Terry so much. Later they would attempt to

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Terry with Nelson Lyon, another Saturday Night Live scribe, ca. 1990s.

write a stage musical about the famous Cotton Club in Harlem. Terry began writing this with Brendan Gill but it wasn’t coming together until Nelson began working with them. They created a terrific script that opened with couples tap dancing as the sounds of their tapping shoes segues into gunshots. When word got around that director Francis Ford Coppola was making his own movie about the Cotton Club, Terry and Nelson’s musical idea went nowhere. Nelson was a good friend to Terry but he scared me. He is, as they used to say, “built like a brick shit house” and, to borrow a phrase from Saturday Night Live, was “a wild and crazy guy.” I also found him to be really bright but he seemed to live his life on the edge. Nelson really tried to get some projects off the ground with Terry but despite their mutual talents they weren’t able to sell a script. Without a steady paycheck, Terry began reluctantly traveling to Hollywood again as he was trying to get any project off the ground. He would step out the front door of the farmhouse into a spring day, everything in bloom around the grounds he loved so much, and I could see the pain and ambivalence as he left for the airport. “Why am I leaving this?” he would say under his breath, but he knew why and tried to make the best of it. One of the screenplays Terry was working on was about Jim Morrison and The Doors. This project was initiated by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt’s wife Althea, a Southern beauty who dressed in gossamer gowns and who had

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a major drug habit—not a good sign. Terry was a big fan of the rock group and knew much about them. He and Althea communicated by phone a lot to discuss Terry’s ideas. However, a major problem quickly arose. Could they get the rights cleared? Without an answer, they pressed on anyway. Soon Terry had, I believe, a treatment for Althea to see. Terry flew out to Hollywood for a week of story conferences at Larry Flynt’s mansion. When he came back, he told me the bizarre story of what happened, which contradicts what has been written elsewhere. Flynt’s mansion was an armed camp with men carrying Uzis, and vicious trained guard dogs patrolling the grounds. Larry was in a wheelchair after recently being shot and wore an American flag as a diaper. Terry was surprised that Dennis Hopper was also in attendance. He was even more taken aback when he heard that Hopper was going to be working with him on the screenplay. Terry, as was his way, just took it in stride. Other guests at the Flynt residence were LSD guru Timothy Leary, preacher-turned-actor Marjoe Gortner, and Madalyn Murray, the founder of American Atheists. Everybody slept until noon and Larry proved to be a generous host, presiding over lavish lunches and dinners. The wine flowed like water and of course there were other, more powerful substances to abuse. Althea was cut off, though, so she would haunt the halls in the middle of the night in her diaphanous long dresses looking to score any drug at all. She tried to get a joint from Terry but he had none. He was into the wine and brandy. Terry, being artistically inclined, designed a banner and nailed it to Dennis’ door. It read, “Toot time at six bells.” Flynt didn’t think that was funny and took Terry to task, giving him a stern lecture. He was serious about trying to keep Althea clean and sober and explained that he was bankrolling the movie to keep her preoccupied. Terry returned home and unfortunately the project was eventually abandoned due to the rights issues regarding the Doors and their music. During another trip to Hollywood, Terry called me and in a small voice asked me to pick him up at the airport later that day. I sensed something was terribly wrong so I rushed over there and waited at the gate. He came off the plane with his usual heavy book bag and was more meek and silent than usual. I took the bag (it felt like it was filled with heavy stones) and we waited at the carousel for the rest of his luggage. He was leaning on me so hard that I could barely stand up but he said nothing. When we got in the car, he slowly told me what happened. He had been at director Tony Richardson’s house in Beverly Hills helping with a re-write of a script. He borrowed Tony’s big tank-like car late at night to drive back to the Beverly Hills Hotel not far away and as he was pulling out of the drive-

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way he was hit by a speeding van with no lights on. He was knocked unconscious and came to when the police arrived on the scene. The other guy was not hurt and an officer asked if Terry wanted to go to the hospital. He unwisely declined but asked for a lift to his hotel. After he was dropped off, Terry had a stiff drink and went to bed. The next morning he awoke in excruciating pain and realized he had to see a doctor. After being examined in the emergency room, he was told he had six broken ribs. He was taped up, given a prescription for Percodan, and sent on his way. The next day he borrowed a small Italian sports car and went looking for a Xerox machine. Preparing to climb out of the tiny auto, he opened the door but because of his broken ribs couldn’t lift himself. Losing his balance and in severe pain, he rolled out of it onto busy Sunset Boulevard, stopping traffic. I guess that frightened him enough to pack it in and come home. Since Terry’s ribs were very sore and he needed immediate rest, I took him to my apartment on Ninth Avenue and put him to bed. He was only able to get out of it by rolling off onto the floor and standing up that way. The next day I was able to get him back to the farm. He was in intense pain and it was many weeks before he could do anything physical. Not a complainer, he just kept writing away in bed. Terry loved being inactive and was satisfied to just lie there and write. He’d get occasional visitors, and someone asked how he was enjoying the Percodan. He replied drolly, “They are interfering with my martinis.” Except for Rip Torn and his family, the Segals, and the Gills, Terry never liked to socialize with anyone at the farm. He loved “living beyond the commuter belt” because it gave him peace of mind and a quiet spot to write. It was his private sanctuary. New York was the place to socialize. The more Terry aged, the more he detested having visitors to the farm. Norman Mailer was living close by in Stockbridge and kept phoning him to get together for dinner. Terry wouldn’t call Norman back. Finally, out of desperation, Norman left a message pleading we meet him halfway at an inn. He sounded so lonely on the answering machine. While listening, I noticed that Terry did not seem pleased at all and a cloud of what looked a lot like pain passed across his face. Norman liked to drink a lot, as did Terry. I don’t know what Terry’s problem was with Norman but I think he didn’t want his private life invaded. This was too close for comfort. Though Terry frowned on having guests, I welcomed the intrusion and the chance to entertain. It broke the monotony of months of quiet with Terry wandering from room to room, day and night, with a sheath of paper tucked under one arm and a pencil in the other hand, settling on a couch to write. In nice weather he would sit outside underneath a shade tree. Sometimes

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when he had writer’s block, he would make me drive aimlessly around the Berkshires while he wrote away furiously in the back seat. The change of scenery seemed to spur his creative process—or so he said. At night he would sit in front of a typewriter set on a coffee table and, with a roaring fire in the fireplace, write until dawn, drinking the entire time. He claimed the booze oiled his mental processes. When the embers would start to fade out, he would pump them back to life with a splash of kerosene. Sometimes he would overdo it and the flames would jump out and up the wall in the old house. I would rush in and find a swaying Terry drunkenly trying to grab the mantle to steady himself. He was lucky the ancient wooden house didn’t burn down. This finally opened my eyes to Terry’s alcohol problem and I didn’t like what I saw. While I was spending time in New York City, I sought out AlAnon, a program for the families of alcoholics. Terry’s drinking and partying ways had become much worse ever since he hooked up with Harry Nilsson and worked at Saturday Night Live. I attended meetings all around town— Greenwich Village, Hell’s Kitchen, and even a church basement on Park Avenue. I learned that I was an enabler, and what to do about it. I had to stop covering for Terry and let him face the consequences for his drinking. Going to these Al-Anon meetings, I learned that my problems were not as bad as other people’s were. One suggestion from the program’s leader that I followed was to let Terry handle his own finances. I had to let the checks

Terry with Bruce Jay Friedman in the Hamptons, ca. 1980s.

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he wrote bounce as he never knew how much money, if any, he had in the bank. But doing this was so uncomfortable in a small village where everybody knows everyone else’s business. The local shopkeepers would get angry at us for the unpaid bills. Terry finally came to the realization that I should handle the finances; unfortunately, though, it didn’t curtail his drinking. I began handling both our bank accounts and slowly paid off his debts little by little over a two-year period. Though Terry hated playing host, he had no problem being a guest and just loved crashing at other people’s houses. We were still visiting friends in the Hamptons and stayed with writer Bruce Jay Friedman a few times. Once we stayed in his teenage son Josh Alan’s room, which was painted a glossy black. Bruce didn’t tell us that painters were coming the next morning to repaint the room white. I awoke early just as the workmen arrived. Terry, who had been up late drinking, was sound asleep and would not budge so they just worked around this big bear of a man sleeping on the floor. When Terry finally woke from his slumber, he was oblivious to the fact that the color of the room had changed dramatically or that there were painters in there the entire morning. Bruce found this hysterical and kidded Terry about it for years. Terry’s next movie that never reached fruition involved his good friends Larry Rivers and Joe LoGuidice, who shared a house in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Larry wanted to shoot a film there based on a story idea by the two of them. Terry was brought in to collaborate with Larry on a screenplay called At Z. Beach. In lieu of a writer’s fee, Terry was to receive 10 percent of the gross profits. Larry put together a production company called Deep Rivers, Inc., and they all set off for Mexico in early 1984 to make cinema history leaving me behind in Larry’s block-long apartment. Larry’s then-girlfriend Phoebe Legere accompanied him. She was a beautiful, sultry blonde vocalist and composer who was part of that East Village downtown performance art scene. Supremely talented, her singing style mixed jazz, cabaret, and rock while she played the piano, accordion, or synthesizer during her stage shows. Terry asked Nile to come along to give his son something to do. Nile had attended UCLA before transferring to NYU. He left and then worked for a period with the esteemed D.A. Pennebaker, a pioneer in documentary filmmaking. I however was forbidden to go. I suspect Terry had plans for a romantic dalliance with Phoebe of the four-and-a-half octave voice and great beauty. He always had a good ear for music. Larry also had another agenda as he was infatuated with an underage girl who lived near their house in Mexico. To make sure she was around, he hired her mother, an American, to be in the movie. Getting their “affairs” in place, or so they thought, Terry and Larry would joke around and say, “It’s the little things that count.”

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As the guys left for Mexico in a swirl of activity, I felt no qualms about being left behind and in fact was delighted. I arranged for our neighbor to feed the remaining livestock at the farm and settled down in Larry’s East Village loft, half of which was his studio. I would sit there for hours in a chair reading or just admiring his work. It was so peaceful and serene. I was in heaven! Mexico, on the other hand, was a total disaster. Terry’s seduction plans went awry when Phoebe fell for Nile! While they spent hours together, Larry stewed and Terry was left to drink too much on some hacienda. He returned in very bad shape with a major hangover. Larry and Joe had a permanent falling-out when Joe learned of Larry’s true motives for making the film. They returned with a mess of footage and as far as I know it was never shown. Hence, ten percent of nothing is nothing, which is what Terry earned from this debacle. The only good thing that came from this Mexican getaway was Nile’s relationship with Phoebe. I loved and adored Phoebe, and she was always welcomed on the farm. Phoebe was so full of life and brought wonderful music into our home. We had an old out-of-tune piano but Phoebe would play it anyway and mesmerize us with her lilting voice. In early summer of 1984, Terry returned from spending a few weeks with Harry Nilsson in LA and immediately began complaining to me about a numbness he was feeling in his left arm. I drove up the hill to my eccen-

Mexican standoff: Larry Rivers and Rip Torn, ca. 1980s.

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tric orthopedic doctor (who took care of my ballet sprains and injuries). He wasn’t there so I asked his nurse what she would do if her husband had a pain in his arm as I described it. She replied, “Get him to a hospital—fast!” She then called ahead to the emergency room. Our neighbor, Dr. Adam, whose family formerly owned the farm we lived on, was waiting for us at the emergency entrance. The doctor quickly diagnosed that Terry was in cardiac arrest and rushed him into Intensive Care. Fortunately it was only a minor heart attack but Terry was hospitalized for a few weeks. He didn’t mind in the least. It’s a beautiful little hospital with spectacular views of the Berkshire Mountains from every window. Terry was happily tucked into bed with his legal pads and sharpened pencils on his nightstand, and around the clock nurses taking care of his every bodily function. He only had to lie there and write. Eventually he was released with nitroglycerine patches, which he had to wear for the rest of his life. Though he was content being waited on in the hospital, Terry was happy to get home but there was the little manner of the phone—or lack of phone— situation to tend to. It is very difficult to communicate with the outside world when the telephone company turns off the service. While I would be teaching my ballet classes, Terry would stroll down the road to a new restaurant that just opened. John Harney the proprietor really liked Terry, who went there every late afternoon to write. Hearing about our predicament, a supremely generous John installed a separate phone line for Terry, and the waitresses would take messages from Hollywood. They would get so excited when George Segal or Elliot Gould would call looking to speak with Terry. Despite the kindness of John and our other neighbors, clearly something had to be done about the finances. I came upstairs with my usual two trays for lunch one day, and Terry was standing in the hallway all dressed up in a suit. I said, “You look like you are going to the bank.” He said, “I am,” and off he went. The manager of the local bank, who held the mortgage for 29 years, wouldn’t deal with him so we were not able to re-finance the mortgage through them. They farmed it out to a private investor who granted us a three-year balloon mortgage. I received even more bad news when Terry told me that Harry Nilsson had moved to New York with his family. He bought a big house overlooking the Hudson River near Sneden’s Landing, way north of the George Washington Bridge. I thought he would have been better off in a brownstone in the city, but I guess his wife Una wanted something more rustic and peaceful as they now had about six children. Once Una complained to me, “Harry yelled at me all the way home from the bridge.” That’s quite a long yell. The house was never completely furnished though Una was trying. Harry invested about $1 million in his own company, Hawkeye Pro-

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ductions. He put Terry on retainer at $3,000 a month to work with him on new projects. Terry was very hopeful that they would finally be able to get a movie financed. I was grateful for the steady influx of money as it paid the mortgage, food, and utilities, alleviating the pressure on me. Harry also let Terry lease a car on the company’s tab so Terry chose a spiffy red Mustang convertible. There was a third partner in Hawkeye named Cindy Sims who manned the office in Los Angeles. She was Harry’s business manager and was to look after the company’s finances. Somebody should have been hired to look after her, as we soon would learn. Living far from the city gave Harry a perfect excuse to spend a lot of his time in upscale Manhattan hotels. Terry would drive down to work with him, which usually consisted of bar-hopping and exchanging lofty ideas. Harry had a lot of original concepts, which Terry tried to make happen, but it seemed Harry always did something to prevent it. He was perfectly content just to loll away the days hanging out having fun, which kept him away from his family a lot. In frustration, his wife remarked to me one day that she felt the worst thing that happened to them was when Harry met Terry. I couldn’t have agreed more and I countered, “From my perspective, it was when Terry met Harry.” I appreciated that Harry was paying Terry but I never thought they would get any film project launched. More importantly, they were a bad influence on each other in regards to heavy drinking and snorting lots of cocaine. In those days, every party seemed to have sugar bowls of cocaine around the room. While Terry and Harry were busy “working” together, I began taking acting scene classes at the Woman’s Ensemble Theater with Marcia Haufrecht, who had studied and taught at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute. While attending Marcia’s class, I met a beautiful, petite blonde singeractress named Ilene Kristen. She was the original Patty Simcox in Broadway’s hit musical Grease and was known to millions of soap opera fans as the deliciously deceitful Delia Reid Ryan Ryan Coleridge on ABC-TV’s Ryan’s Hope. Only someone with Ilene’s comedic abilities and acting talent could take such a flighty character (Delia pushed her first husband down a flight of stairs, faked a suicide attempt to keep him from divorcing her, feigned blindness to hold on to husband #2, his younger brother no less, and then set up her eight-year-old son to be accused of stealing as a ploy to win back hubby #1) highly lovable and endearing to fans. Ilene had been off Ryan’s Hope for a year or two and was doing a lot of stage work. We hit it off immediately and began working together on a play called Full Moon & High Tide in the Ladies Room, which Marcia had written. It was a very funny comedy about seven women who go in and out of a public restroom. Ilene played an airline hostess and I played a wealthy housewife from Westchester. We appeared

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Publicity photo for the 1984 production of Full Moon & High Tide in the Ladies Room with (clockwise starting at top left) Lolly Susie, Marietta Forgue, Ilene Kristen, Margie Currie, and me.

in a limited Off Off-Broadway run of the play directed by Bonnie Walsh at Theater Studio on Eighth Avenue. One day after rehearsal, Ilene accompanied me to meet Terry at Harry Nilsson’s hotel. As I expected, Ilene hit it off immediately with both of them. Harry and Ilene sang duet after duet a capella. We were entertained for hours listening to these two wonderful singers. Harry could be so charming at times (but rarely towards me) and really made Ilene feel welcomed. I wanted to branch out beyond acting since I felt I wasn’t any good at it and began taking a theater-directing class from Jack Garfein at the Actors and Directors Lab, upstairs from the Harold Klurman Theater which Jack founded. I was introduced to Jack in Hollywood during my starlet days and would now run into him at the Actors Studio. He was a really interesting, intellectual person and a wonderful teacher. He also happened to direct one of Terry’s favorite movies of all time, The Strange One, based on Calder Willingham’s novel End as a Man, about life in a military academy in the deep South. Jack and I got along wonderfully so he hired me to work in the office and then I became his personal assistant for a short while. As part of my duties, I was able to work with him on his theatrical productions. I learned a lot and began thinking about producing summer theater up in the Berkshires.

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I was sidetracked from this because I had this burning desire to also produce a ballet video. Music videos were all the rage thanks to MTV and I had an idea to choreograph a ballet to Elton John’s song “Funeral for a Friend,” which I thought was more classical than typical rock ’n’ roll. I rounded up my student Diane Anastasio to play a widow, her friend from the Joffrey Ballet to play a priest, and a local older man who took dance classes to play a mourner. My character crashes the funeral and dances on the guy’s grave. Another friend, photographer Ray Block, brought a film crew up from New York. We set up a mock cemetery in someone’s garden during the middle of winter and shot the 20-minute piece in one day. This was my lone excursion into the world of music video and one of the few people who saw it was the junkie friend of the cinematographer during the editing process. I was told that once he heard the opening church bells, he popped right up out of his drugged-out haze and watched the entire video wide-eyed. While living and working part-time in New York, I still found plenty of time to socialize with Gerry Page, who was appearing in Sam Shepard’s new three-act play The Lie of the Mind that opened in December of 1985. She invited me one night to come see it. It was a gritty look at spousal abuse set in the American West and focused on the families of the abusive husband played by Harvey Keitel and his wife played by Amanda Plummer. Gerry played Keital’s mother who can’t face the realization that her son is a brute and capable of hurting his wife. Coincidentally Rip Torn’s first wife Ann Wedgeworth had the more comedic role as the mother of Plummer who in the first stages of Alzheimer’s says some outrageous things. The night I went to see the play, Wedgeworth suddenly took ill. After the first act was completed, Gerry exited stage right only to re-enter stage left for the second act playing Ann’s part! For some reason the understudy did not go on. Gerry was simply mesmerizing and was able to create two distinct characters at the drop of a hat. Afterwards, I shared a cab with Gerry who kept apologizing to me about what happened and said she’d invite me to see the show again. I told her it was a fantastic night of theater and there was nothing to be sorry for. Gerry was so modest in regards to her talent. Juggling my full-time ballet teaching in Connecticut and working parttime with Jack took its toll on me after about two years. Exhausted from the constant commute, I left Jack when I decided to take a chance and produce local theater with New York actors during the summer of 1986. I asked Rip Torn for advice on how to go about it and he gave me some ideas. He had been producing and directing one-act plays in a church in Chelsea. I was able to secure the use of an abandoned schoolhouse. I decided to do three oneact Chekhov plays that Terry adapted for me. The first person I cast was Ilene Kristen, who chose to play the widow in The Boor who fights her attraction

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to one of her late husband’s creditors who has come to claim the money owed him. I played the role of an over-the-hill unmarried woman who was being courted by the aging bachelor who owned the farm next door in The Marriage Proposal. It was such a funny farce as the two “lovebirds” quarrel over the ownership of an adjoining orchard and who has the better pet dog while the woman’s harried father tries to patch things up to get his almost spinster daughter married. I held auditions for some of the roles in New York City. I couldn’t afford to pay the actors but they received free room and board. There was a lot of drama backstage, believe it or not, for this small production once we began rehearsals. Ilene got irritated with the actress who was originally going to play my role because she overheard the girl asking if there was tennis and swimming facilities available. Ilene was outraged by this demand and the next time I came to rehearsal I noticed the actress wasn’t there. I asked, “Where is she?” Everybody was very evasive and someone chimed in sheepishly, “She isn’t coming back.” Aghast, I replied, “Who is going to play her part?’ Ilene replied, “You are, Gail.” There was another actor casualty. The man we cast in the role of my suitor was a Russian man recommended by the actor who played my father. While rehearsing in the city, all of us were off book except him. I was concerned that he wouldn’t be able to memorize his lines in time but he told me not to worry. When we got up to Canaan to rehearse in the space, he was still on book. I suspected he wasn’t capable of playing the role. He still insisted that he would be ready by the opening. Two days before, he still had not memorized his lines so I fired him. He seemed relieved as he dropped his script to the floor and rushed out. I stood in the doorway of this tiny oneroom school-house and shouted after him, “And furthermore, you’ll never work in this town again!” Luckily for me a screenwriter-actor who had visited with Terry recently agreed to take over the role. Later that day as I was driving home, I noticed him with the script, gesturing wildly in a field of daisies, learning his lines. He was wonderful in the part and helped save our show. I booked a table at a local restaurant in Great Barrington for an opening night celebration. The entire cast attended as well as Terry and Rip Torn. When the bill arrived, Rip reached down and nonchalantly passed me a $100 bill. He whispered, “I think you may need this.” Rip sometimes surprised me with his caring and generosity. I truly appreciated his gesture. We received good notices from the local papers for our off-the-wall production. Weeks later when Brendan Gill reviewed a Chekhov production done in New York City for The New Yorker, he referenced our show, raving, “Now that’s how Chekhov should be played.”

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We were such a hit with the locals that I arranged for us to do another series of plays the next summer. Ilene couldn’t join us because as soon as she returned home, ABC-TV came a-calling and wanted her to reprise her role as Delia on Ryan’s Hope. She accepted their offer and entertained audiences until January of 1989 when the soap was cancelled. My friend Amy Wright agreed to star in our production of Trifles by Susan Glaspell. Amy is an extremely accomplished and respected actress in her own right. She had a lot of stage experience and even co-starred in two hit Broadway plays, Fifth of July (1982) and Noises Off (1983), for which she received a Drama Desk Award. On the big screen, Amy earned excellent notices for her performances in Breaking Away, Wise Blood, Stardust Memories, and Inside Moves. Amy is so talented and I don’t know why she didn’t become a bigger star. The play Trifles was an adaptation of Glaspell’s short story “A Jury of Her Peers,” which she wrote after covering a man’s murder while she was working as a reporter. In the one-act drama, a Mrs. Wright is being held in jail for the murder of her husband. Amy played Mrs. Hale, the wife of a farmer, and I played the sheriff’s wife, Mrs. Peters, who wait in Mrs. Wright’s kitchen while their husbands plus a district attorney search for clues upstairs. While gossiping and rifling through Mrs. Wright’s belongings, the women find a box containing her beloved canary, its neck broken. Knowing that her abusive husband must have done the deed, they realize she must have snapped and killed him in a blind rage. They then hide the evidence from the men. Amy and I had done an Off Off-Broadway production of Trifles previously at the Quaigh Theater for its lunchtime theater program for local high school students. Most of these kids had never seen a live theatrical performance and, being raised on television, didn’t realize that the actors could hear every sound they made. It was a bit disconcerting to act in that environment but the kids were intensely interested and had a lot of questions for us during the Q&A that followed. Meanwhile, despite my qualms about their partnership, Terry and Harry actually finished two scripts between their bar-hopping and drug-taking. The first was called Obits and came from an idea Harry had about a reporter who writes bizarre stories for a supermarket tabloid like The National Enquirer. It never got optioned but their next, The Telephone, did. Originally written as a play in two acts, it was about a “young eccentric out-of-work actor” named Ross Wilcox living in San Francisco who loses his mind while ensconced in his apartment making phone calls all day to various people. The audience only hears one side of the conversations. At the end of the play, a repairman dispatched from the telephone company arrives to retrieve the telephone since the service was cut three months prior. Going berserk, the

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actor kills the man by pummeling him with the receiver. You needed a comic with acting skills to carry off this tragic comedy successfully as it is completely set in his studio apartment and very claustrophobic. In 1985, Terry and Harry shopped the play around to various producers including Lewis Allen but could find no takers. They then adapted it into a screenplay with only one person in mind for the lead—Robin Williams. Previously known for playing a wacky alien on TV’s Mork and Mindy, he successfully broke into films and gave standout performances in Good Morning, Vietnam and Moscow on the Hudson. The Telephone screenplay was sent to Williams’ agent who turned it down, to the guys’ disappointment. Undeterred, they tried everything to meet with Robin to try to convince him to reconsider. On happenstance, they ran into him at the Improv on Sunset Blvd. and Robin told them that he never got the script. They later found out his agent detested it so much, he refused to let Williams read it. The guys were dejected until they bumped into Whoopi Goldberg in the parking lot of the Chateau Marmont. She had just received an Academy Award nomination for The Color Purple and returned to her comedy roots in the movies Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Fatal Beauty. She expressed interest in The Telephone so a script was sent to her. Once she heard that Rip Torn was attached to direct, she accepted. Seems she was fond of him and Geraldine Page as they all lived in the same Chelsea neighborhood though Whoopi, then an unwed mother on welfare, lived in the projects but would pass the couple once in a while on the street. Rip had directed a few stage plays and Terry thought he would more than capably handle the movie since the majority of it was set in an apartment. With Whoopi signed on to star, Terry and Harry had to make adjustments to their screenplay. The lead character went from male to female and was now named “Bobby Blue.” New World Entertainment bought the rights to the script and Harry and Terry were paid a sum of $200,000 split evenly between them plus 4 percent of the net profits. Our celebratory mood quickly soured when my dear friend Gerry Page died suddenly of a heart attack on June 13, 1987. Diagnosed with high blood pressure, Gerry wasn’t keen on taking her medication because it made her feel woozy and hurt her performance (she was starring on Broadway in a revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit). A few days after her death, they had a memorial for her at the Neil Simon Theater. Terry and I were invited and the place was packed with Gerry’s friends and colleagues. Terry couldn’t attend so I went by myself but got there late and could only find a seat in the balcony. Rip, who was still legally Gerry’s husband, was the first to pay tribute to her and gave a very moving speech. Gerry’s children all spoke as did a number of celebrities including James Earl Jones, Viveca Lindfors, F. Murray Abraham, Horton Foote, and Richard Chamberlain.

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Despite his loss, Rip had to get it together to direct The Telephone on location in San Francisco. Terry of course went also to be on the set as he was with most of his other movies. Unfortunately this would turn out to be Terry’s least favorite shoot. Problems with Whoopi Goldberg erupted right from the start of filming. First I think she didn’t like the name of her character so it was changed to “Vashti Blue.” Then she insisted that her thenboyfriend David Claessen be hired as the cinematographer. Things got progressively worse. Whoopi wouldn’t follow the script and to Rip’s frustration began improvising the scenes. Needing her box office clout, the producers often sided with her. Terry told me that they would shoot a scene her way and then Rip would ask her to do a take as written. “Do it for the writer,” he would plead. Terry thought Whoopi was very talented and inventive but would sit in his trailer dejected and perplexed by her behavior. I think Whoopi was the first actor not enamored of Terry’s dialogue and this frustrated him. He asked me when he returned home, “Why would someone commit to a movie due to the love of the screenplay and then constantly change the dialogue?” The shoot of The Telephone did have its good moments for Terry. His friend Elliott Gould, who he met through George Segal, made a cameo appearance playing Goldberg’s agent. Gould proved to be a good sport as Whoopi’s character drives him out of her apartment by pretending to fart on him. Terry never wrote toilet humor so I am guessing this was Goldberg’s contribution. It was also a family affair for Rip as his companion Amy Wright played an irate neighbor and his daughter Danae Torn was “Midge,” one of the voices on the answering machine. Whoopi hated The Telephone and sued New World Pictures to prevent its release, claiming she had approval of the final cut and did not give her consent. She lost but one of Terry’s funniest scenes was cut from the movie: The great actor Severn Darden, playing a commercial actor dressed as a hot dog, paraded by her window, annoying Whoopi’s character, who verbally sparred with him. It was typical Terry outrageousness but Goldberg supposedly was none too happy with it. Rip’s cut of the movie was taken to the U.S. Film Festival in Park City, Utah, later to be renamed the Sundance Film Festival, where I think it was screened out of competition. Coincidentally, Terry was asked to be a judge that same year. He loved awards and readily agreed. Terry was still trying to get his son Nile involved in the film industry so he invited him to come along. But once we landed I don’t recall seeing Nile again during the entire trip! The Festival put us up in a beautiful apartment overlooking the mountain slopes of Park City. We literally could step outside the door and ski. I had no interest in seeing any of the movies so while Terry was sitting in dark-

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ened theater after theater with the other dramatic judges (producer-writer Gale Anne Hurd, director Tim Hunter, and Edward R. Pressman), I was enjoying nature. The Grand Jury Prize that year went to Heat and Sunlight, written and directed by Rob Nilsson. It beat out (among others) John Waters’ Hairspray. I know Terry was a huge fan of Waters and he voted for that. At the awards ceremony, a guy representing American Express proudly explained that the funding for the winning film was completed on an American Express card when they ran out of money. I took a lot of pictures that night but incredibly not one of Robert Redford! What was I thinking? New World Pictures’ cut of The Telephone was released in late January 1988 without much fanfare to an uninterested public. It received mediocre reviews (Caryn James writing in The New York Times described it as being “as dull as it is exhausting to watch”) and bombed at the box office, earning barely $100,000 in the U.S. It is the only film of Terry’s that doesn’t have a cult following. Some time after returning from Sundance, Terry was contacted by a young Brit named Perry Richardson. From the age of seventeen to nineteen, Perry worked with photographer Michael Cooper as his assistant. Perry was now putting together a book highlighting Michael’s photos. He knew that Terry was a part of that Swinging Sixties London scene and was interested in hiring Terry to interview some of the subjects for the book. Perry called wanting to meet Terry to discuss the project. Perry flew into New York City and we gave him directions by bus to the farm in Canaan. I remember waiting and waiting for him. He was hours late and I started to fret, imagining that he got on the wrong bus or worse that he was mugged and lying in some alley. Luckily, he wasn’t and came merrily strolling down our long driveway. Perry and Terry hit it off immediately. They enjoyed each other’s company so much, and would laugh uproariously the entire time they were together. Perry was just the medicine the Father and son sleep en route to Park City, Utah, 1988.

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Enjoying ourselves at the U.S. Film Festival Awards banquet.

doctor ordered to keep Terry’s spirits up. And he always made sure that Terry got paid. The first book they collaborated on was called Blinds and Shutters. It was printed in a limited edition with some copies signed by Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, and others, and released in the summer of 1989. By this time, Michael had almost been forgotten and this book reminded the world of his unappreciated talent. The next publication concentrated on Michael’s photography of The Rolling Stones. For this book, Perry arranged for Terry to meet with Keith Richards, Anita Pallenberg, and Marianne Faithfull in New York City. Terry tape-recorded the interviews and then hired a typist to transcribe them. He worked from the transcriptions and as he was “tightening and brightening” he would jokingly say to me, “Remember, Gail, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” The Early Stones: Legendary Photographs of a Band in the Making, 1963–1973 was released in 1992 by Hyperion. My personal favorite photo is a self-portrait of a bare-chested Michael, who was so handsome, with his arms crossed and a hand on each shoulder. The text is very interesting as Terry posed many insightful questions to Keith, Anita, and Marianne. And their answers and anecdotes brought the wonderful still photographs to life. The book was a success. Perry loved working with Terry and would solicit Terry’s services for a third book, Virgin: The History of Virgin Records, that came out in 1995, shortly before Terry passed away.

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Terry mingling with other filmmakers at the awards ceremony, 1988.

Shortly after judging at the U.S. Film Festival, Terry was asked if he’d like to come back and teach a screenwriting course at the Sundance Institute where Robert Redford had his home and school. Terry readily agreed and we were off once again to Utah. However, soon after we landed, Terry became dizzy for a period of time. He was having trouble with the altitude, a condition which lasted a few days, but at least the cabin where they housed us was warm and rustic. The complex had a gift shop and a restaurant. The students were all grownups with finished scripts for Terry to advise them on. Terry and I had read them together and picked the ones he had ideas for. One day while Terry was in class, I had a ski date with a friendly young woman who worked in the office. At the last second, she had to cancel so I took off on my own—never a good idea. I went up the lift and down the other side of a very large mountain. I took a second lift, which had three seats across with no safety bar, to the tiny precipice of the mountain. I kept sliding around on the lift and when I looked down I saw a fiord that would strike terror in any sensible person. There were only two ways off the mountain. I asked the only other person around, “Which is the easiest way down?” and he pointed to one of the runs. It looked so steep and all I wanted to do was call the office for a helicopter rescue but this was long before cell phones. Taking a deep breath, I pointed my skis down the mountain and took off. I didn’t get very far as the tips of my skis became firmly implanted in a snow bank of a narrow mountain path with a monumentally steep drop-off behind

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me. At this inglorious moment, the guy I asked for directions skied by and, slowing down, asked if I was okay. Nobody whose ski tips are firmly embedded in the mountainside is okay. I slowly inched my way down the slope and needless to say didn’t go back. My ski adventure inspired a middle-aged guy who should have known better to rent some skis and take to the slopes. He smelled of the Fulton Fish Market and the women in the writing program refused to ride in the van with him. Just before he left, he remarked, “I must be crazy to risk life and limb when the great Terry Southern is about to meet with me and go over my script.” I am happy to report that he survived his ski run and made it in one piece to his appointment with Terry. Meals came along with the accommodations but unfortunately the food was, as Terry used to say, “Cuisine Minceur.” That’s “vegetarian” to the English-only crowd. Terry and I were starving the whole time. Fortunately, Robert Redford had a fine restaurant and grill at Sundance so while Terry was teaching one day, I snuck off and got myself a memorably thick and juicy steak. One night Redford invited us to a party at his home on top of a mountain. We got all dressed up with Terry in his best sports coat and me in an evening gown. A nice young guy named Jerry Rees, who had an animated film called The Brave Little Toaster in competition the prior year, offered to

No pictures, please! Terry and me during our second visit to Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute.

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drive us to the party in a blizzard. I never had the heart to tell him that I saw his movie, one of the very few I had seen at the Festival, and really disliked it. There were about forty guests and we all gathered in the bar area. Redford shyly snuck in, intermingling with the guests. He then invited us into the living room. Apparently he designed the entire house—from the inside out—himself. His living room had a climbing wall above a massive fireplace. Rumor has it that he insisted his wife try it and when she fell off, she demanded a divorce. After the party ended we trekked through the snow banks to drive back down to the complex. Rees left his keys in his locked automobile. I could not believe that he would even think of locking the car doors in a blizzard while parked at the top of a mountain on Robert Redford’s estate. You couldn’t get much safer than that. I was frustrated but Terry took it in stride and chatted happily with the few hangers-on who were also dumbfounded that he locked the car. Redford himself went to retrieve a coat hanger to jimmy the driver’s side door open. After returning from Sundance, we were shocked when Terry was diagnosed with colon cancer. He was scheduled immediately for an operation (Valentine’s Day at Sloan Kettering in New York City) thanks to the help of Jean Stein. I drove him to the hospital in my old Honda but couldn’t believe I was doing that. To borrow a phrase from the play Sideman, “It was like taking a cat to the vet.” I drove and drove, and wondered what Terry was thinking, and if he knew what was in store for him. He was quiet the whole way there, not wanting to talk about it. We arrived at Sloan Kettering and he was quickly checked in. I went to the apartment of my friend Amy Wright, who had graciously offered to let me stay with her as Terry would be hospitalized for about ten days. The first morning, Terry was in the operating room for about five hours. I sat in the waiting room nervously knitting an intricate pattern of four colors for a sweater, which I never completed. Every few minutes or so I would look up, hoping to see Terry’s doctor come through the doors. Fortunately, the operation was a success and Terry was cancer-free. While he was recovering at the hospital, three or four doctors would swoop into his room a couple of times a day to check up on him. He said to me, “They come in and out of here like a bunch of William Morris agents.” After being released, he spent the next three months recovering at home. To make him more comfortable, I purchased a nifty hospital-type table that tilted. He wrote from it the entire time he was laid up. While Terry was recuperating, I kept teaching at my ballet school, which I had recently opened nearby. I had been working for seven years at a ballet school in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, about eleven miles away

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from our farm for a woman whose dance floor was as slippery as ice. Rosin was a no-no and the school was a tax write-off for her wealthy husband. She knew nothing of ballet and the slick floor was so dangerous that I smuggled into the school a little rosin in the top of a wine box for the students to dip their toes in; the next day it was gone. In ballet, you need to take off and land safely and a slippery floor makes it tricky. Her refusal to address this problem irked me greatly but I needed the money so I continued working there though it limited my teaching methods as I was careful to keep the students from falling. Finally, I couldn’t take it any more and sent her a letter explaining that ballet could not be taught on that floor and it could be harmful to the students. She ignored me once again so I quit. I found space about a mile from where we lived and opened my own small school. I had a sign painted by a local Italian artist and hung out my shingle. Interesting people brought their children and I was able to safely put my dancers on pointe on a dance floor made for ballet. An enterprising woman named Sandra Cuoco enrolled her children and encouraged me to transfer the school to another nearby village. She offered to become my partner and said she could also substitute for me. I agreed and we found space right in the middle of the town of Lakeville. Her father came and built a sprung floor for us. I brought the students to a nearby city, where I also taught at Nutmeg Ballet School, to take part in major productions of The Nutcracker and other 19th century ballets in a restored theater. Some parents had never seen a ballet so I had to absorb the ticket price for mom, dad, grandma, grandpa and little brother. The Berkshires were home to many celebrities and I got to be acquainted with a few of them. Meryl Streep brought her youngest daughter to my Saturday morning class and would hunker down on the pink fluffy rug watching gleefully as I taught the littlest ones. One day I couldn’t get my older girls to leave so I could start the next class because Kevin Bacon had enrolled his daughter. I had to throw them out of the studio. To see these teenagers, who I had trained since they were little, waft out the door in their gossamer summer dresses was amazing. This new school with Sandra was just ideal for this small community. We stayed in business together until after Terry died. Before I left Canaan for good in the late Nineties, I handed the school over to her and she taught there for a couple of more years. In September, one year after The Telephone came and went in theaters, Terry’s agent was contacted by an attorney representing German actresses Regina Lemnitz and Erica Gesell. They wanted to buy the rights to the stage version so they could have a playwright translate it into German with the

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Here I am demonstrating the ballet position “attitude devant” to one of my students, ca. 1989.

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idea to tour it in Germany and perhaps other countries in Europe as well. I know Terry sent them a copy of the script but I am not sure if they went ahead with the deal. Soon after, Terry’s monthly stipends from Hawkeye were arriving later and later. He would phone Cindy Sims and would be told “the check is in the mail.” Then one dark night we were sitting at home having dinner when Terry noticed that the tail lights of his beloved Mustang were going down the driveway. He called the police and they stopped the car at the end of the road. One of the officers came back to the house and told us that it was the repo man. Sims had not made the lease payments in months. I had to go fetch the car from the pound the next day. Things then got terribly worse. We learned that Sims embezzled all of Harry Nilsson’s money, leaving him less than $500 in his account. He pressed charges and, convicted, she only wound up doing two years in prison. In my mind, that punishment was too lenient and she deserved worse. Not surprisingly, Hawkeye Productions folded and Terry was once again scraping to make ends meet.

12. That’s Prof. Southern to You! After the demise of Hawkeye Productions, we were really strapped for money. Terry lost his monthly $3,000 stipend and knew he had to do something to help support us. I don’t know whatever happened to the money he supposedly earned from his share of selling the screenplay of The Telephone. It is possible that he never even received it and it went to Hawkeye Productions. If that is the case, then Cindy Sims embezzled it as well because I definitely don’t remember Terry receiving such a large sum of money from Harry Nilsson’s company. Terry’s writing fees from working with Perry Richardson on the books about photographer Michael Cooper plus the income I made from my ballet school were still not enough for us to sustain ourselves. Neither were the royalties Terry began receiving from the release of his first novel in almost twenty years, Texas Summer, which he sweetly dedicated to me. Terry had been working on this for the past two decades. Autobiographical in nature, it was an expansion of his short story “Red-Dirt Marijuana” from his anthology Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes. A leisurely tale about a twelve-yearold Texas farm boy and his friendship with a black hired hand who works on his family’s ranch, the novel received good notices but was not a bestseller in the least. Richard Seaver was the publisher and for some reason didn’t promote the book very well, even letting it go out of print after the first small printing. I also think Terry’s fans were expecting another black comedy or satire but instead he delivered a charming coming-of-age story in the style of Ernest Hemingway. Despite it being the least successful of all his works, it is my favorite novel by Terry because it was his most personal. Terry usually took failure and rejection (as well as success) in stride but he was deeply hurt when his good friend Larry Rivers chose Arnold Weinsten to co-author his memoir. Terry couldn’t understand why Larry didn’t ask him. I could. Terry was still recovering from his illness and I think Larry felt Terry wouldn’t be up to the challenge. After reading his book entitled What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography, I think Larry made the right choice as I think it would have been too challenging a project for an 208

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ailing Terry. I told Larry that I really enjoyed his book and he quipped, “Maybe next time I’ll tell the truth.” Struggling to pay our bills, I mentioned to Terry that perhaps he could get another professorship. Terry didn’t want to teach again, remembering his brief tenure at NYU. But, desperate, he relented and let it be known that he was available. Word reached director Milos Forman, the head of Columbia University’s Film School. The university offered him a position as an adjunct professor teaching an introduction to screenwriting course in the morning and an advanced screenwriting course in the afternoon. In late August 1991 Terry began his classes. We arranged for him to teach on Wednesday and coordinated it with other plans we made in the city such as dinner with friends, a check-up at the hospital, or a cocktail party. I still had my own ballet school and worked my schedule around Terry’s. His classes were three hours each, 10 A.M. to 1 P.M. and 2 P.M. to 5 P.M. We had to leave before dawn to get there. Two hundred candidates had tried to sign up for each of his classes, vying for only thirty open slots apiece. They all had to submit scripts, which the film school pared down and then forwarded to Terry, who had to choose the best. I remember spending a week with him reading and discussing the screenplays as he made his selections. All was going well though a bit hectic when, four weeks after classes began, Terry suffered a mini-stroke. That morning I had brought him to

Prof. Southern on his way to teach class at Columbia University, 1991.

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Sloan Kettering for a colonoscopy, which is standard procedure for patients who have had colon cancer. By 11:30 we were checking into the hotel because the next day Terry had to teach his Wednesday classes. I dropped him and the bags off at the entrance and spotted a terrific place to park across the street. I executed the perfect New York U-turn and knifed into a spot just beyond a bus stop. I looked over for approval and saw Terry, with a silly grin on his face, grasping the thin brass pole holding up the green awning and slowly sliding down it. I got out of the car and raced across the street. Terry was almost on the ground. He was totally disoriented and I couldn’t get him to his feet. I called to a passing couple who alerted the hotel’s doorman, who ran out to help. We got Terry to his room and I went downstairs to check in. When I got back, Terry was sleeping. He woke up about three hours later craving Japanese food. When we got on the street, Terry was staggering all over the place. I wrapped Terry’s arms around a lamppost and asked a young police officer if he knew of any open Japanese restaurants. Back then they used to close between lunch and dinner. He looked at Terry, decided he was drunk and beat a hasty retreat. Terry and I lurched from lamppost to fire hydrant to mailbox past many closed restaurants and finally found a tiny place that was open. It was stand up, with three tall stools to sit on. Terry ate his sushi and felt better. We walked a little straighter back to the hotel and he went to bed. I fell asleep in front of the TV and woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of porn stars copulating on a local cable access channel. Groaning, I turned off the TV and went back to sleep. The next morning I had to move the car. Terry promised to stay put and wait for me, but when I got back to the hotel he was gone. I frantically searched for him with no luck. After checking out of the hotel, I raced up to Columbia thinking he may have decided to go there on his own. Sure enough, he showed up in time for his ten o’clock class. I was furious with him. He apologized and said sheepishly, “I had to go find a Kinko’s to photocopy some pages.” Columbia did not give him any access to an office or a copy machine. I tried to stay out of his teaching affairs as much as possible and just deliver him to the door but this seemed ridiculous to me. Once we returned home to Canaan, Terry remained in bad shape and we went to a doctor who said Terry had suffered a stroke. His arteries were severely blocked, but obviously the blood had found another way to his brain or he would have died. He started to get lopsided from then on, his face sagging on the left side, his left arm shriveling and his left foot dragging when he was tired. His hair turned the most beautiful combination of white and silver gray. But he was easily confused. He spent most of the week in bed and would get up only to teach or attend some social occasion, which I tried to combine with our long drive into the city.

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Shortly after Terry had the stroke, we were invited to dinner by Linda Segal. She was there alone (George was out of town on a film shoot) and Terry was having trouble walking. He said that he “had lost his gait.” Linda went into a hall closet and produced a collection of canes. Terry chose one that looked like an Irish walking stick and went toddling home with a whole new gait. He used that cane for the rest of his life. Linda was always a gracious hostess and seemed cheerful on the outside regarding her new life, but she suffered from depression. A doctor prescribed a drug called Tegretol, more commonly known as Carbamazepine. She caught a cold and had no white blood corpuscles to fight it. She lapsed into a coma while in Los Angeles, and when she woke up a month later she had a tracheotomy and a colonoscopy. I went to my village drug store where there was a computer to look up the drug’s side effects. Sure enough, a lifethreatening low white blood count was one of them but very rare. I heard a woman psychiatrist on TV say the drug was safe though “one in a thousand” suffered from side effects. Linda was admitted to the UCLA Medical Center and I sent her a miniature herb garden with a note wishing her a speedy recovery. She called to thank me and her voice was only a whisper. The poor girl lingered on for a few years, in and out of the hospital, but I never saw her again. An extremely devoted George stayed by her side during that painful time and she passed away a year after Terry died. Terry still didn’t teach from the front of the room like most professors. But unlike at NYU where he moved the class to a pub, Terry knew better this time and conducted class with everybody sitting around a long table. Due to the after-effects of his cancer operation and the stroke, he would doze off as the students read aloud from their scripts. If Terry heard anything interesting, he would wake up and get involved. He had discovered Post-Its and the scripts would be papered with them all down the page, like shingles on a roof. He only used yellow and wrote specific comments on them. At home he would leave a trail of yellow Post-Its everywhere he went. I remember finding one stray Post-It on the floor that read, “Carlos, I told you not to do that. Don’t do it again.” He had many scripts to deal with. These kids were working on computers and Terry was using a pencil. This took all his time at home. Loving cinema, Terry also would screen movies for his class. Two of his favorite motion pictures from this time were Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and the documentary Hoop Dreams. One of Terry’s students was a young man named John Kim who remained friendly with Terry until his death. John enrolled in “Advanced Screenwriting” and, arriving for his first class, found Terry sitting on a wooden chair outside the classroom. John recalls:

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Trippin’ with Terry Southern He was holding a mahogany cane between his knees, securing it by crossing both wrists over the handle. His hair was pure white and flew about his head in foot-long strands. He had a magisterial air about him, but it wasn’t of the old-school variety—in short, he seemed like a mythical character, a Lear in tweed. I drew near cautiously, as one learns to approach celebrities in a film school—that is, wary of cold disdain—but Terry was quick to speak. “The door is locked,” he explained. Then, pretending to peek through the keyhole, he continued, “They must be firing up the wog-hemp.” Terry was certainly not your typical Ivy League professor.

John was a dear boy and one of Terry’s favorite pupils. He would slip Terry short stories to read and Terry always obliged, returning them full of various-sized Post-Its of comments and suggestions. Describing Terry as a teacher, John remarks: In class, he was so taciturn that one would glance over occasionally to see if he’d perhaps fallen asleep. He had little to say about garbage, and since a good percentage of what was read aloud in class could be described as such, he rarely spoke. It was only when a scene took his fancy that he would rouse himself from his apparent slumber and become suddenly voluble, offering inspired hints which immediately provided the work with another dimension, usually one which was hilariously unforeseen.

It is not surprising to me at all that Terry rarely commented on material that was inadequate. He hated to talk about negative things. But as with

An ailing Terry with his friend and student John Kim, ca. 1994.

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life, sometimes the bad needs to be confronted. And when you’re a teacher, constructive criticism is not a terrible thing to offer a student. After dropping Terry off at class every Wednesday, I would go have lunch with my friend Madeline Gill (one of Brendan Gill’s daughters), who lived down the street from the school. Sometimes, however, Terry would get out of class early and go tottering off in the wrong direction, heading for Harlem. It was dangerous at that time, especially for an old man with a cane. Teachers were being mugged in their doorways. I had to give up lunch with Madeline. After that, I stayed in the lobby the entire time reading and rereading the school newspaper with one eye on the bank of elevators. Even so, Terry would sometimes toddle past and I would have to go running into the street to find him. He would be cross as two sticks with me and bark, “Where were you?!” The minute we returned home, Terry would take to his bed and work on his student scripts on that tilt-top hospital table that we bought for him. I would bring two trays of food up so we could eat together. My ballet school was in a nearby village but driving even that little way, I would worry, thinking I was leaving a dying man alone. Teaching my students took my mind off of Terry for a few hours, but sure enough something usually happened while I was away. Trying to be helpful, he would venture outdoors to get some wood for the fireplace, but he would fall over trying to lift the logs that were frozen to the ground. I asked him not to bother any more and he seemed relieved. The winters were always cold and snowy. The temperature was sometimes ten below zero. I came back one night and Terry was really shook up. He had fallen into a snow bank in the driveway far from the house with a leg twisted under him and his cane out of reach. He couldn’t get up and thought that he might freeze to death. He somehow made it back to the house and didn’t do that again either. Despite his frustrations, Terry was very sweet after the stroke. He became resigned to his condition and was not impatient with his handicap at all. He would just wait in the hall with one arm stuck out for me to put on his jacket and coat, gather his school bag and glasses, and get him into the car. With two hospital scares, it was time to confront the inevitable. I asked him to write a will. He said, “I already have one.” Unbeknownst to me, his lawyer drew one up for him in 1989, before he went into the hospital for the colon cancer operation. I felt relieved until Terry continued, “But I can’t find it.” A few weeks later, he was reading something intently by the window in his office. I asked him what it was and he replied, “The new will.” He then wanted to know if I thought Nile was capable of being the executor of his estate. I immediately answered, “Yes, he’s your son and only child.” Terry was unsure. I went on to tout Nile, telling Terry that he would rise to the

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occasion and I would help guide him to people that Nile didn’t know who loved Terry. After hearing my reasons for championing Nile, Terry agreed. I then read the document and it seemed all right to me—a little vague—but I chalked that up to lawyer lingo that I knew nothing about. Terry gave me a copy of his notarized will and I put it in my bedside drawer. I was doing literally everything for Terry at this point, and teaching ballet classes at my own school, so I had no interest in being executor, or even thinking about life after Terry. I was trying to keep him alive all by myself. Terry was an excellent patient and always followed doctors’ orders. He slowly recovered to a miraculous degree and wrote feverishly. Prolific director James Goldstone (who won an Emmy for the TV-movie Kent State and whose films include Jigsaw, Winning, and Red Sky at Morning) had bought a house in Vermont and was looking for a script that he could shoot there. Terry had known him from his days working in Hollywood. I would drive Terry up to Goldstone’s place about once a week and would have to drive back later that same day. This went on for about two months. While the guys wrote, I would hang out with James’ wife Cookie who showed me how to do pilates one time and it almost killed me! I then volunteered to scout locations for the movie and took pictures of various places where the film could be shot. This was much easier on my body. They came up with Green Mountain Boys, about the American Revolution and the land grab between settlers in the disputed Vermont territory and the “Yorkers” who lay claim to the lands. In typical Terry Southern weirdness, the script begins with revolutionary Ethan Allen relieving himself on a fence post as his dog tries to avoid the spray, before going into the story of how a band of villagers nicknamed the Green Mountain Boys, led by that scoundrel Allen, stood up to the British who were trying to keep control of the land. This was another wonderful screenplay by Terry in the vein of the bawdy Tom Jones and was yet another unsold screenplay that he wrote on spec without ever receiving a penny for his time. It would turn out to be his last. Before the start of the second semester, Terry came down the elevator in Dodge Hall looking puzzled. He told me that the strangest thing had happened. They had cancelled his advanced screenwriting class, which was a continuation of the introductory class with students he had been working with for some time. He said the only logical explanation was jealousy. Terry was the only professor teaching screenwriting there at that time who had ever made a film. The students went en masse to the administration office to complain and Terry’s class was reinstated. It was also around this time that Terry’s friend Jean Stein called to make a lunch date with him in the city. She recently authored American Journey:

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The Times of Robert Kennedy and Edie: American Girl and was now the publisher of Grand Street magazine. I drove Terry into town to meet with Jean at the very classy Petrossian restaurant while I waited in the car since I was not invited. Jean knew that Terry was in dire financial straits so, wanting to help him out, she generously offered to put him on the payroll of her taxexempt foundation. His stipend was $200 a week and Jean would also pay Terry to write for her publication. If he was late with his pages, Jean would withhold payment until the article was received. Terry and Jean adored each other. She would leave long rambling messages on our answering machine in the middle of the night. She would talk on incessantly about Terry’s submitted stories, which she would compare to the stories by Jonathan Swift, or about some party she attended that night. Terry would play them for me in the morning and they were so amusing. Jean also began hosting literary events at Rockefeller University. These were important to Terry, but somehow I could never coordinate them with his Columbia teaching schedule. He was insistent on going and never wanted to miss one. After dressing Terry in his finest sports coat, I would tuck him into the back seat of the Honda with all his books and bags and drive all the way to the city for a two-hour cocktail party from six to eight. I was like the mailman as “Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night” could stop me from getting Terry to these parties. I have to admit that all the trouble it took to get there was worth it. All the programs were simply wonderful with so many intelligent, witty people. Terry was always so impressed. Gore Vidal was the guest of honor once—he was so handsome, brilliant and charming. Edward Said, an advocate of Earl McGrath and Terry at one of Jean Stein’s litPalestinian rights and pro- erary events, ca. 1990s.

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fessor of English at Columbia University, was another. The cocktail parties following the talks always had exquisite food, beautiful decorative flowers everywhere, and great lighting. Jean and her companion Torsten Wiesel, an enigmatic Swede who was the president of the university and a Nobel Prize winner in physiology or medicine, were charming hosts. I remember one party where I went outside for a smoke. Some gentleman engaged me in conversation. I mentioned that I was with Terry Southern and he said he used to know him. When I told him that Terry was here, he became very excited and followed me back inside. As we crossed the large room to where Terry was sitting on a couch, frail and gray, his two hands leaning on his elegant cane enjoying the swirl of the party around him, I pointed him out and the man just froze in his tracks. The passage of time undoubtedly shocked him. But he did gather himself together to say hello and made a hasty retreat. Terry loved Jean Stein’s events so much, he liked to invite guests along. One night we brought Anita Pallenberg and a few of her friends. She was notorious for her wild lifestyle but here she was on her best behavior and had so much fun. The next time we received an invitation, Jean asked Terry that he not invite anyone without her approval. Obviously, Anita’s reputation preceded her. Jean was quite forthright about this, and Terry was astounded that his friends, whom he thought were fascinating, wouldn’t be welcomed. Though we were always invited to the cocktail parties, we were never asked to dinner afterwards, as Jean did not consider us part of her AList crowd. The party would end promptly at eight and Jean and her entourage would go off to some elegant restaurant I presume. Terry and I would go for a quick cheap bite, usually at some Japanese place. Terry would chuckle thinking of Jean Stein and her ilk, saying, “I bet she doesn’t even know what is in her portfolio. They never dip into capital. It’s so odd. They have more money than they will ever need, and yet are supposedly enlightened liberal people.” We also still managed to socialize with Larry Rivers and the last time we were at his home in the Hamptons was the summer of 1992. We were sitting on his back porch talking to a teacher from City College. He had been ill and had gone to a doctor in Chinatown for some herbal medicine, which he swore had cured him. Terry was intrigued and asked for the doctor’s card. I made an appointment with Dr. Zang and the next thing I knew we were driving up and down the crowded streets of Chinatown searching for a parking space. I finally found one several blocks away from Zang’s office and Terry and I tottered off to meet him. Finding the address, we had to ascend a steep flight of stairs and then found ourselves in an herbal pharmacy in all its weirdness. Dr. Zang, a tiny Asian man in his fifties wearing a white lab

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coat, was standing there and introduced himself before leading us into a small examination room. Dr. Zang sat across a table from Terry holding his wrist as if he was taking his pulse and gazed into his eyes. Terry approached this with his typical open-mindedness. After a few minutes, Dr. Zang finally let go and pronounced that he had a cure. We went back into the pharmacy part of the office and a young Chinese woman ladled out a bag full of herbs. What they were, we were never told. I was instructed to go home and cook them in a crock pot for twelve hours for Terry’s consumption only and was not allowed even a taste. We toddled back down the stairs to the teeming, bustling streets of Chinatown. The heat began to get to Terry who was tottering on the brink of collapsing so I suggested we get some lunch. I pulled him into the nearest restaurant, which was full of Chinese people sitting around large round tables. There were no tables for two so we joined a group who mostly spoke Chinese. They all smiled and waved their chopsticks at us. After getting ourselves settled around the cramped table, I noticed that we were the only Anglos in there. Women began coming around with mysterious little carts and I realized we were at a dim sum place. One of the diners spoke a bit of English so she helped us with the ordering while the rest of the folks at our table kept smiling and nodding. Poor Terry was still not feeling well. He looked like he was about to keel over and fall out of his chair. We ate quickly and as we got up to leave the woman, who spoke English, remarked, “Don’t leave too big a tip and spoil it for us.” I got Terry home to the farm safely and dutifully plugged in the crock pot. I emptied the contents from Dr. Zang into the boiling water. Terry said the herbs looked like debris from the forest floor. The strangest aroma filled the whole house. The next morning we peeked into the pot and it looked disgusting. Ever the brave soul, Terry downed a glass. He drank it every day from then on as I kept boiling away but I never once tasted it. Even then I was still following orders like a good ballet dancer. Terry claimed the potion helped him and he felt better after drinking it. Every other month Dr. Zang would send these little packages in the mail. It looked like marijuana and I was sure someone from the post office was going to bust us. The brew kept Terry alive for another two years but I never discovered what type of herbs it was made up of. Because he was feeling better, Terry decided to go to a sex dysfunction doctor on East 72th Street, just down the block from George Plimpton’s place. Our sex life had ended with the colon cancer in 1989. I wasn’t that disturbed about it as sex was a low priority for me. Dancing was my turn-on and my idea of good sex was the pas de deux from Sleeping Beauty, which is a dance for two, but I could understand Terry’s concern.

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I drove him to his appointment. He got out of the car and toddled across the street to the doctor’s office. I waited and waited for him, never taking my eyes off the front door—sort of like a dog waiting for its master. Eventually I panicked thinking something went wrong and maybe he had gone out another door. I began driving around the block looking for him. After searching aimlessly, I pulled over exhausted and suddenly there he was staggering over to the car. He was mad as a hatter and fit to be tied. “Where were you?” he yelled. “I’ve been walking around this block for hours!” I realized then that I had driven right past him a couple of times. In my mind, I was looking for a younger version of Terry, not this ancient whitehaired old man with a cane who he had turned into. My eyes and memory tricked me. He had aged so rapidly after the stroke that I couldn’t keep up. Only sixty-eight, he looked twenty years older. As bad as 1992 was, things got even worse in 1993. It was a period in my life where I would get out of bed feeling like I was going to jump out of my skin. I would gaze out the window and wonder if I could keep going. Terry loved driving to the post office every day. We had no mailbox for many years after some teenage pranksters blew it up one Halloween. Because we never replaced it, mail delivery ceased so we had to go pick it up. I always dreaded it, knowing there would only be bills, but Terry was always optimistic, hoping something good would arrive like a check. He would shout, “Deus ex machinas!” before opening an envelope. Sometimes he would be right. Annoyed and relieved at the same time, I chalked it up to the luck of the Irish. A visitor to the house once asked Terry what it was like to have to write things like album liner notes for Marianne Faithfull and articles like the one he did on ZZ Top for Spin magazine. He replied, “It is the worst kind of donkey work.” Even so, Terry took these writing projects very seriously and he was always half-drained after completion; teaching at Columbia drained the rest of him. Before he got the job there, I tried to get him a faculty position at a quiet university far from New York for him to earn just enough money to feed us. But Terry was stubborn and didn’t want to leave the farm. He was ill and there was no way I could change his mind. Knowing we were in tough shape, Brendan Gill offered to help Terry get published in The New Yorker. It was always a goal of Terry’s to have an article run in the prestigious magazine. Alas, even with Brendan’s influence, Terry’s piece was rejected. Of course, he never let me read it so I have no idea what he wrote about. That was always his way. Desperate, a very unenthusiastic Terry reluctantly accepted an offer to write his autobiography. Being a true hipster to the end, he liked looking to the future and not the past. The book idea was shopped around and pub-

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Terry with his Berkshires buddy, Brendan Gill, ca. 1990s.

lishers Little, Brown and Company offered an advance of $60,000 in installments against royalties. At the same time we were waiting for Little, Brown and Company’s first $15,000 payment, writer Ted Mann (who had met Terry on one of his sojourns to Hollywood) sent some videotapes of the new hit TV series NYPD

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Blue for Terry to watch. He was trying to get Terry a job writing for the show and wanted to get him familiar with its style. Terry was promised $5,000. The tapes arrived in the mail but no check. We were desperate for money so I called the production office in LA to inquire about the payment. I got producer David Milch on the phone; he didn’t know anything about it. I explained that Terry was promised a fee and he asked how much. I got the amount mixed up with Little, Brown and Company’s and replied, “$15,000.” There was a long stunned silence and then he put me on hold. When he got back on the line he said that I was mistaken—the amount due was $5,000 and that a check would go out the next day to us. I was so relieved and thanked him. Terry had meandered into the hallway and overheard the tail end of the conversation. I explained what happened. He said incredulously, “You didn’t do that, did you?” I sure did and the check arrived as promised. Terry watched the tapes but a writing job never materialized. Terry went to work on his autobiography after the publisher’s first check was sent. He submitted about forty pages to the assigned editor, Fredrica S. Friedman, and received the most disheartening letter in return. She demanded it be “funnier, wilder, more antic” and wondered if he was just a writer for hire and what was the point of him writing his autobiography. All future payments would cease unless Terry shaped up! It was a horrible letter for Terry to receive at this point in his life. He felt so offended and dismayed that he quit writing the book. I’ll never know the frustration that this man endured for so many years as he always kept it bottled up inside. I could only watch and try to help. We finally received a dash of good news when Nile told us that he and his new girlfriend Theodosia had decided to marry. We were invited to the ceremony to be held in her native country of Greece. Terry was not well and didn’t feel strong enough to attend. He survived a cancer operation, a stroke, and a heart attack. He was very frail and thought the long journey would be too much. All he wanted to do was sit home and write. I had a spring recital to put on with fifty of my ballet students. Even so, I wanted us to go. I thought it was proper and he owed it to Nile to be there. I went to a travel agency run by Pakistanis who found us cheap tickets to Athens but with a nine-hour stopover in Amsterdam. I charged the air fare and ordered a wheelchair for Terry to get through the airport. Terry was offended and threatened not to go. Reminding him how he loved being sedentary, I said, “You’ll love it,” and he did. I pushed him halfway around the world in that wheelchair. We landed in Amsterdam. Forgetting about the famous hash bars (I know Terry would have enjoyed just sitting there getting stoned), I stupidly booked us on a weird sightseeing tour of the canals by boat. We took a short

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trolley ride into town and walked to the dock. The small boat was immaculate. I was starving and in the galley I smelled something cooking that I didn’t recognize. It was croquettes made with horsemeat. We had ham sandwiches instead. Our first stop was a twelfth century castle. The northern terrain was pretty rugged but the air was so crisp and clear. Even so, Terry felt dizzy and looked really pale. He stayed huddled down on the boat while everyone traipsed to the castle. It had a drawbridge and a moat. I thought it was incredible. Inside, there was a huge ballroom and at the end of it was the first working indoor toilet with clay piping. I climbed to the top of the turret and looked out over the horizon. Glancing downward, I noticed Terry hobbling across the cobblestones. He smiled and waved his cane at me. Worried that he might fall and hurt himself, I ran down the stairs to escort him back to the safety of the boat. We returned to Amsterdam late and had to rush to the airport. Because Terry could barely walk, the sky captain drove us in a motorized cart, careening around inside the terminal, just missing travelers, to get us to our gate on time. It was amazing! We somehow made our flight to Greece with a few seconds to spare. We only had one night in Athens and the room that had been booked for us overlooked the ancient ruins. The view was glorious but they turn the lights off at 11:30. The next day we flew to Thessalonica, the bride’s hometown. We were only there for three days because of my school recital. On the first night the bride’s parents, who didn’t speak a word of English, hosted a dinner at a local tavern with plenty of Ouzo flowing. This was just up Terry’s alley—free liquor! Nile wore a tuxedo and his bride-to-be looked gorgeous in a strapless gown featuring a zebra-striped bustier, blue sash, and a black skirt. Nile’s mother (whom we hadn’t seen in many years) was also there as expected. We were prepared for this reunion and were all cordial to each other. Also in attendance were Nile’s aunt and her daughter who was in college. The girl mentioned to me that she wanted to become an actress despite her family’s trepidation and I exclaimed, “That is wonderful!” But I got icy stares from her relatives. I guess parents worry when their children are drawn to the arts. The morning of the wedding, Terry and I dressed in our finest. Traveling light, he wore his trusty blue blazer and I was clad in dressy white pants with a long black top that came mid-thigh. The marriage ceremony was held at an ancient church, which proudly claimed that St. Paul preached there in 50 A.D. I didn’t know you couldn’t take photographs in a church and just kept snapping away, flash and all, fading the frescos in the oldest corner. Soon others followed my lead but they got noticed by the priests and had to stop.

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Terry was so weak he had to sit in a chair by the door, leaning heavily on his cane, his now snow white hair blowing in the gentle breeze. Nile wore a pale gray tuxedo and Theodosia as expected looked stunning in her white wedding gown. The ceremony seemed to drone on forever but we atheists survived and made it to the reception afterward. The food was disappointing but the Ouzo was divine and I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Greek men perform their native dances. Terry had fun but due to his health we departed before the reception was over. I knew he must have been disappointed because Terry never was the first to leave a party. The next morning we flew back to Athens where I found that my travel agent had screwed up and there was no return reservation. Luckily we found a trusty wheelchair for Terry while I tried to get us home. I just stood there silently with Terry sitting by my side while the ticket agent punched away at her keyboard trying to book us on a flight. I truly believe the airline really wanted to get rid of us. They miraculously got us on the next plane for New York City. The grumpy customs agent didn’t want any part of us and just waved us through. We landed in a drenching downpour and I could barely stay awake on the drive home. I kept saying to Terry, “Talk to me so I won’t fall asleep at the wheel.” I was so tired I was afraid I’d miss our turnoff. Terry was happy in the back seat chatting away, trying to be helpful. I made it home and we both fell into bed totally drained. The next day was my outdoor recital of Alice in Wonderland in my neighbor’s garden and it went off without a hitch. My youngest student was cast as the Hedge Hog and didn’t want to play it even though her mother had sewn a wonderful brown-felt costume for her. The diva-in-training reconsidered after she was told the Hedge Hog was one of the leading roles. I trained the dancers, choreographed the ballet, and wrote the review for the local newspaper. I always got raves! It was a big hit with the students and their parents too. That summer started off very peaceful as we whiled away the long hot days. Terry would write all day, sitting at our picnic table content and happy without a care in the world. He had no financial worries—they were all mine. I kept busy gardening and teaching ballet classes. I had a summer program where I would take the students to the lake after the morning class. We would barbeque and have lunch. The kids would go swimming until their parents picked them up after work. I also had a part-time job as a private dance teacher to the grandchildren of a wonderful woman who was descended from a very old, wealthy New England family. She lived in a castle-like house made completely of stone. I would hold classes for her grandkids in the majestic ballroom. One day, on my way to teach there, I started to get stomach pains.

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When I got home, Terry was in bed and I told him that I thought I had been poisoned. He said, “Nonsense, Gail. No one has been poisoned for years at the castle.” Terry and I were driving around one afternoon when we came to a farm stand. Terry decided to buy six handsome red hens, which we didn’t need. We had sold all the livestock in the early Eighties and the last thing I needed was to have these damn chickens running around. But of course I said nothing as we hauled them into the car and headed home with the birds flapping away in the back seat. After getting them to the farm, I had to go back out and buy 100-pound sacks of chicken feed. We hadn’t much money to live on and Terry made these irrational purchases all the time, not realizing how expensive it was to feed and care for animals. I should have put my foot down but I knew how sick he was and thought if having these hens would give him pleasure, who was I to stop him? Sometime in late summer I was having my morning coffee and looking out the window when I noticed a car coming up the driveway. It looked familiar to me but I couldn’t place it. I then froze in fright when I realized who it belonged to—Mr. Teleman from the IRS! Sure enough the car stopped and he emerged from it wearing almost the identical suit and carrying the same briefcase as he did when he last called on us over twenty years ago. The last time I pretended to be the housekeeper but Mr. Teleman didn’t recognize me, to my surprise. This time I just let him in and stood there in stunned silence as he informed us that Terry owed $30,000 in back taxes and $40,000 in penalties for nonpayment during the years 1987 to 1989. The whole time Terry was working for Hawkeye, Harry Nilsson’s business manager never paid any of the taxes, which she was supposed to. Terry tried to reach Harry a number of times on the phone but he never returned any of his calls. After Mr. Teleman left, I felt like I was hit by a Mack truck. Taking over the finances a few years before, I had just managed to pay off all the debts to the pharmacy and other local shops and was feeling good about my accomplishment. Now I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t believe Terry once again got himself into this situation. You would have thought he would have learned his lesson, but having such a creative mind he just couldn’t focus on business details. I imagined us being evicted from the farm by the IRS, with Terry, me, Belle the dog, two cats and six red hens out on the street with nowhere to live. I would glance at the local motels and inns while driving by, wondering if they would take us all in. Next we received a notice that the three-year balloon mortgage was now up. With Terry in debt again to the IRS, we had to desperately refinance the farm to remain living there. I went to the local bank and, like Terry a few

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years before, was turned down. I applied for a second mortgage at every financial institution in the area and was rejected by all of them even though millions of people were refinancing due to the low interest rates that year. One day I was reading the National Registry of Historic Places’ monthly publication that they sent to me. I got the beautiful old house registered the year before. It took a great deal of organizing and research but since it was built in Revolutionary times I thought it was worth documenting its rich history and owners. In the Registry’s journal I saw an ad for the Bank of Boston, which specialized in mortgages for historical houses. I called and had a very pleasant chat with a woman. We made a date for her and a colleague to come look at the farm. I was in the process of getting the exterior of the house painted and asked the contractor if he could come over that day and pretend to be starting on the job. I positioned a ladder near the front door and asked him to get into his white painter’s pants. He refused to change but climbed up wearing his khaki slacks and windbreaker, and started to scrape. I dressed Terry up in his finest sports coat, made a great salad, and set the picnic table underneath the tall old willow tree. I was trying to stage manage the entire meeting. The two bank reps arrived in their business attire and high heels. I gave them a tour of the entire farm, inside and out. They were both very classy and just loved the place. We had lunch and Terry was his most charming self. Even though Terry had no credit rating and the only collateral I had was an old Honda and a one-room ballet school, they were eager to grant us a loan. However, since Terry’s ex-wife was on the mortgage, we needed her to co-sign, which she did. Anxiously waiting for Terry to start teaching his new classes, a student called and said he couldn’t find Terry on the list of professors. I thought it was an oversight since we received a letter dated August 11, 1993, from the chair of the Film Department, addressed to “All Film Division Faculty” announcing, “Welcome to the new academic year!” and another letter dated August 14 from Brendan Ward asking Terry and all other film professors to attend a meeting on August 28 before classes began. I had even gone out and bought him a new tweed sports coat to wear for the new semester. Alarmed, I phoned the chair and asked, “What is going on?” She said that she phoned Terry back in June and told him that she was dropping all his fall classes and would pick them up again in January. She said, “Terry replied, ‘Let’s have lunch.’” He never called her back to set up a date to meet or relayed this bit of news to me. I lost my temper and told her that we never received anything in writing stating that Terry would not be teaching in the fall and it was too late for him to find another teaching job. Getting nowhere with her, I confronted Terry and asked if he remem-

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bered speaking with her. He was evasive but even so, I felt that we should have received official written notice of his temporary suspension from teaching. I immediately fired off a letter which included the following: Terry’s students love him, and stay in touch, working with him long after they have graduated, knowing they are with a master. A teacher we met there uses Candide and Candy in his Comparative Literature course, which is part of his syllabus. Everywhere we go people say, “Is that really him [Terry Southern]? I studied him in school.”

I raised such a fuss, justified I might add, that about a week later we received a call from Lewis Cole, the film department’s co-chair, who set up a meeting with us. This time I made sure to attend by Terry’s side. Lewis was sympathetic and said, “Let’s see if there is something we can do about your purloined classes.” He contacted Alan Ziegler, the head of General Studies in another building. He was so excited and said, “I’ve been waiting for Terry to come teach here for ten years.” Unfortunately, Lewis was only able to offer Terry one advanced screenwriting class so he lost half his expected income during this semester. Terry was an adjunct and was paid about $40 per hour and now he was to receive only half his salary till Christmas. Then we found out that he wouldn’t even get this as the IRS garnished his wages as well as his pension from the Writers Guild and Social Security. We received a letter from Columbia saying, “Please resolve this matter forthwith”! We were still waiting for the refinancing to go through and we were desperate for money. I remember somebody told me about the PEN American Center, the oldest human rights and literary organization, which helps writers around the world. Classes had begun again and, after dropping Terry off at Columbia to teach, I hopped on the subway to visit their Broadway office in Soho. I had phoned ahead to make an appointment but didn’t even get past the administrator sitting at the front desk. I had explained about Terry’s illness and recent stroke and his IRS troubles. She was sympathetic but explained that PEN could not help. I was surprised and told her that I thought PEN helped writers in financial trouble. She said they did but there was nothing she could do in this case. Desperate and willing to grovel, I pressed on saying that Terry was very ill and had very little income. She acquiesced and promised to send a check for $1,000. That was all PEN could give. I thanked her and left. Grateful for what PEN could spare, I was still confused and disappointed in their attitude. I got back on the uptown train to Columbia where I waited for Terry’s class to end. The money arrived as promised and I bought food and gas for the car with it but I still had the mortgage, heat, phone, drugstore and all of the other monthly bills to pay. The mortgage payment alone was $1,100—$800

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towards the first mortgage and an additional $300 towards the balloon mortgage to a private person that Terry had to take out when the bank denied him a second mortgage on the one he held since 1960. On the bright side, Terry’s one class was six to nine in the evening at Lewishon Hall and the students were older and paying their own tuition. They were a bit more serious and most enterprising as well. For example, Terry wanted to show a film one night but the audio-visual office was closed. He thought then it would be impossible to present the movie. One of the students assured Terry that he would get a monitor and sure enough came back with one in about ten minutes. Terry didn’t ask any questions and showed the movie. The students would also help me get Terry down the stairs and into the car. While Terry taught his night class, I spent the time reading in the lobby of the hall. One day I noticed this ten-year-old girl practicing her ballet exercises in a perfect manner. I asked her where she studied and when her mother came out of class we had a pleasant conversation. She asked me if I would mind monitoring one of her daughter’s ballet classes. I did and the following week said to the mother, “Your child is very talented but you’ve got to get her out of that school immediately.” She asked, “Where should I send her?” I recommended the School of American Ballet, which was the training ground for Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. She knew of it but was not sure if her daughter would get in. I said positively, “She will.” And she did. Just before the holidays, her harried mother came to me and said, “I’ve got fourteen Nutcrackers to do!” Much to Terry’s delight some of his old friends, who all dropped him in the Sixties after he had left his wife, began socializing with him again. We had lovely dinners in the city. I would drive home late at night, Terry happy and asleep in the backseat. In October we received good news from the Bank of Boston that all the paperwork was processed and we were ready to sign off on it. We had to get to the closing in Stamford, Connecticut, over two hours away. Terry’s longtime attorney offered to drive. I was relieved that I could be a passenger for once. It was a beautiful early autumn day and there was small talk all the way there—everything from the weather to what was growing in my garden. I expected our attorney to inform us what to expect at the signing but he never once brought it up. After arriving in Stamford, our lawyer surprised us and said we had to pick up Terry’s ex-wife from the train station. Sitting next to me, I could feel Terry stiffen. At the depot, Peter made us get out of the car. Terry, with me beside him, hobbled onto the platform. The train arrived and we waited for his ex-wife to disembark. Terry was shaking and leaning on his cane for sup-

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port. The lawyer almost awkwardly introduced us. “You all know each other—don’t you?” Terry stepped forward, embarrassed, and said, “Thanks for coming.” We toddled back to the car, got in, and drove to the bank’s lawyer’s office. Again just small talk and nothing said about the re-mortgaging. At the closing, everyone sat around a circular table. I was sitting next to Terry but our presence was barely acknowledged. The papers flew around the table, everyone signing many forms busily without saying a word or without explanation. I sat there helplessly, out of the loop. Our lawyer drove us back to his office where I had left my car. Again nothing was said about the closing the entire way home. Finally arriving back at the farm after a long day, Terry was about to open the front door but froze. He turned to me and said, “I think someone is trying to get the house.” I was holding him up by the elbow to steady him and assured him that no one was trying to take his home from him. He relaxed and sighed with relief, but he turned out to be right. It would have broken his heart to learn of the loss of his beloved farm. We never saw a dime from Terry’s share of the refinancing. It all went to the IRS and to pay off the balloon mortgage. I wished there had been a little left over to live on; It would have made a big difference in the last few years of Terry’s life. We were starving, I had to get him to his classes, and I had to come up with another $500 a month for the mortgage payment. I called his lawyer and said, “I can’t understand how so much money could change hands and we are worse off than before.” He said he didn’t know either and would be sending his bill in the mail. There was some good news though. With the government paid, Terry was able to receive his Writers Guild pension again and his full pay from Columbia. We needed a break from the mortgage drama and thanks to Josh Alan Friedman, one of Bruce Jay Friedman’s talented sons, we got one. Josh was living in Texas and invited Terry to read and discuss his work at the Dallas Art Gallery one weekend in November. We had known Josh since he was a little boy and would come over to our rented house in Amagansett to play darts. At this time he was an aspiring musician (a talented blues guitarist, he since has released four albums) and author (his first book was Tales of Times Square and his most recent When Sex Was Dirty) living in Texas with his wife Peggy, a graphics designer. Josh said he felt sorry for the lonely work of the writer, compared to a musician, who got applause every night. And he wanted to introduce Terry’s work to young people who may not have been familiar with his satirical writings. Our plane landed in Dallas just after sundown. I remember looking up into the night sky and seeing a crescent moon and a single bright star nearby.

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We were met by a gorgeous redhead named Betsy Thaggart who was our designated driver. Terry was charmed by the young woman as he always had a thing for titian-haired beauties. He was seduced by his redheaded aunt at a young age and while living in Greenwich Village he romanced model-turnedactress Suzy Parker for a while. While chatting with Terry in the car, Betsy, a young writer herself, discovered to Terry’s embarrassment I’m sure (and my delight, knowing what he was thinking about her) that she was a distant cousin of his. She remarked with a laugh, “If I had known before that I was related to you, I would have been even more arrogant than I already am.” She took us to a meet-and-greet and to see the hall at the art gallery where the event would be held. A beautiful blood-red oriental carpet was on the stage, with a table and chair in the middle. We were then taken back to the hotel for Terry to rest and get ready for the reading. I left Terry alone to continue working on his script. He had a wonderful pocket-sized hardcover copy of The Magic Christian, which he had used to rewrite certain passages while on the plane. Even though it was published years before, Terry never felt any book or screenplay that he completed was perfect. Deciding The Magic Christian needed to be updated, he spruced it up by dropping certain phrases and replacing them with more current references. Terry was really sick, and fading fast, but he had the most remarkable ability to This gorgeous redhead named Betsy Thaggart turned gather his strength and to pull himself together out to be a distant cousin of Terry’s, 1993.

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when needed, and would just collapse afterward. He was excited to participate in this program, and was pleased to learn that it was sold out. Terry read passages from The Magic Christian with great enthusiasm and with total focus. The audience was entranced and he had them in the palm of his hand. The crowd laughed uproariously and it seemed that he could do no wrong that night. Terry was a hit. After the reading, a line formed in the lobby with people clamoring to meet him. Most had brought items for Terry to autograph. The organizers scrambled to set up a table and chair so Terry could sit and sign books. Even at this stage in his life, Terry was still awkwardly shy but utterly flattered that people would want his autograph. A guy standing next to me said that he had driven eighteen hours to get there. I was shocked that he had come so far, and asked if he would like to join us for a drink. He politely declined because he had a long drive back. The next day Josh mentioned that Terry’s hometown of Alvarado was nearby, and asked if we would like to see it. Terry hesitantly said yes and Josh drove us there, not knowing what we would find. I thought it would have developed into a small suburban town with a strip mall but it was right out of The Last Picture Show complete with tumbleweeds rolling down the streets. It was as if time had stopped. There was the village square surrounded by deserted shops and an abandoned railroad track alongside it. The movie theater was boarded up and probably hadn’t shown a movie since Rock Hud-

Terry reads from his work at the Dallas Art Gallery, 1993.

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Terry’s childhood home in Alvarado, Texas.

son romanced Doris Day on the big screen. The only place open was the drugstore, which was the same one his father had owned. Josh barged right in and started talking to the woman behind the counter. She didn’t know much about its history so we left and drove around the tiny town in circles while Terry reminisced about his youth. We came upon the modest house where Terry was born only after he recognized the house next door. His childhood home was being remodeled so it didn’t look anything like its former self. They wanted me to go and ring the doorbell, but my usual bravado failed for some reason and we drove to the local graveyard. Terry got out of the car and puttered around for a long time, stopping every few steps and just standing there, leaning on his cane, reading the tombstones. Josh and I waited in the car as we wanted to give him his privacy with his family and friends who had passed away. Josh was so cool and so wonderful to take the time to do this. Terry enjoyed the time in Alvarado immensely despite his trepidation about returning. We drove back to Dallas through Fort Worth, and Terry quickly found the house he had lived in from the age of eight. At the end of the street was the movie theater where he whiled away many an afternoon. It was there that his love for cinema began. When we returned to New York we were invited to a reception at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park. Situated right next door to the more

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famous Player’s Club, the National Arts Club is a private organization for people involved in any form of the arts. Terry fell in love with its kitschy interior and voiced a desire to join in spite of the fact that he never joined any clubs because as Groucho Marx used to say, “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.” We didn’t have the money to pay the yearly membership fee but since Terry’s heart was set on this, I somehow scraped up enough cash George Segal and Perry Richardson at the National Arts to join. Terry, being Club, 1993. such an Anglophile, just loved its private restaurant with its English menu complete with Shepherd’s Pie and fish-and-chips, and we went there frequently. Sometimes we’d invite guests such as writer John Marquand, Jr., publisher Perry Richardson, George Segal, and others. At one point somebody asked Terry why he had joined the National Arts Club. He replied, “Because it looks like a John Waters movie.” Thanks to Dr. Zang’s concoction, Terry thought he was feeling much better and decided to head out by bus to New York City by himself. The beautiful and talented singer Marianne Faithfull had called and invited him to lunch, probably to discuss a work project. Terry had previously written the liner notes for her album Strange Weather. I tried to have him change the date to the day he taught class but he refused. Terry told me he wanted to prove he could handle being on his own again. After he got all dressed up, I drove him to the bus depot and watched him go off. Unbeknownst to me, that sneaky old man had a condom stashed in his wallet and thought he was off to a romantic liaison. I had no idea what possessed him to think he had a chance with Marianne. Terry met the vocalist at the Café des Artists but she had her manager in tow, putting a damper on Terry’s seduction plans. After lunch they departed and Terry headed over to the Port Authority where

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he proceeded to get lost amongst the many departure gates. Luckily, a boy from our town recognized Terry and guided him to his bus. I thanked the boy profusely when they debarked but then noticed that Terry didn’t have his book bag, which was full of his students’ scripts. He was despondent and didn’t know what to do about the lost homework. Terry’s spirits picked up the next day when a woman called and told me she found his bag in a cab. We then had to take a long drive to the city and back to fetch it so Terry could have them corrected for his next class. One day in April, Jean Stein called me and surprisingly said she wanted to throw Terry a party for his seventieth birthday, which was on the first of May. She asked me where he would like it to be and I suggested Elaine’s in New York. She seemed surprised, like maybe it should be someplace grander. But I assured her that we spent so many wonderful evenings there that it held fond memories for him. We then composed a small guest list: John Marquand, Jr., and his companion Susan Martin; Michael O’Donoghue and his wife; Cheryl Hardwick; Larry Rivers; Earl McGrath and his lovely wife Camilla; and Jean with Torsten Wiesel. Terry knew all of the guests except Darius James, an engaging young writer who had worked at The Village Voice and who was invited by Jean to the party so he could meet Terry. They became great friends. As a surprise for Terry, Earl, the one-time manager of The Rolling Stones, had Mick Jagger drop by after dinner. Mick was his usual quiet self and sat next to Terry talking. Terry was so pleased and had a grand time but

Terry at his seventieth birthday party at Elaine’s with Mick Jagger, 1994. Photograph by Camilla McGrath, courtesy Earl McGrath.

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Terry and me with Michael O’Donoghue and his wife Cheryl Hardwick, 1994. Photograph by Camilla McGrath, courtesy Earl McGrath.

as I was watching him I realized that he looked very tired and worn-out. In fact, he had only one more birthday to celebrate. The spring semester soon came to an end and Terry had no income to help support us. Out of desperation we decided that he should file for unemployment benefits. I drove him to the unemployment office, which was located in an almost abandoned mall in a rundown town nearby. We had to stand in a long line waiting to speak to a case worker. Terry would be clutching his cane and leaning heavily on it while swaying back and forth so much that I could hardly steady him. The weather was hot and humid, the shops in the mall abandoned, and the windows sealed shut. A young woman in the office took pity on us and helped Terry fill out the forms. She let us come right in, and could see that Terry was in no condition to do much of anything. Going through the motions, she recommended a library job about two hours away, knowing that it was impossible for Terry to get there. She was just so sweet and made sure Terry got his money. We would drive home in the unbearable heat in silence. Terry would doze off in the back seat, exhausted, and just wanting to go to bed. I was furious and would think, “How could someone of Terry’s stature and respect in the literary world have to grovel and seek help from the government?” I think if Terry hired people who really looked out for him, he wouldn’t have ended up in this predicament this late in life. We just refinanced a house and I couldn’t believe that Terry did not get anything to live on. I knew he owed

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the IRS but felt if he had someone shrewd and dedicated enough, something could have been worked out so he would have a nest egg to live on. But Terry was loyal to people he trusted and kept his attorney around way too long, as he did his literary agent. The fall semester began and Darius James got permission to monitor Terry’s classes at Columbia. Afterwards, he’d stay with Terry until I arrived, helping me get him into the car and then head for a good sushi dinner for the long trip home. Fair weather or foul, Darius was always there to help Terry climb the stairs at Columbia. Sometimes we would see him on the weekend when he would bring his interesting friends up to the farm. He later booked Terry into the Nuyorican Poets Café on the Lower East Side for a reading. Darius was a godsend and so talented. Terry appreciated and admired Darius’ 1995 book That’s Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss ’Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury); Terry felt those low-budget popular action movies starring African-American actors and actresses were important in Hollywood history and considered Darius’ work so insightful and valuable. He felt that it should be used as a textbook in film classes for years to come. Meanwhile Terry had befriended a Great Barrington book dealer named Michael Selzer who had recently moved to the area. He bought the best stationery store around and proceeded to ruin it by selling cut-rate clothes by the bushel, and a lot of cheap knickknacks. He proposed to Terry that he could sell his personal papers for a six-figure number, and Terry would, of course, continue to generate more as long as he kept writing. Needing the money, Terry agreed. Selzer came over one day with a station wagon and hauled away all of Terry’s unorganized papers that had been stored in the attic and office. They came back sorted in cardboard boxes obviously labeled by his children, misspellings and all. One March day after a slushy snowstorm, two guys showed up from New Haven in a van. They spent many hours going through these boxes while I was in and out doing chores and Terry tried to write. At one point I overheard them say that they would take all of it for $50,000. One of them had his checkbook in his hand. I stepped in and said, “Wait a minute, Selzer said six figures.” He said, “Whoa, that is $100,000.” I replied, “Yes, I know that.” Extremely agitated, he started shouting that it had taken them five hours to get there in the storm and he had no knowledge of that amount. I held firm and reiterated, “There is no way you are taking these papers for under $100,000.” They left in a huff and drove off empty-handed. He was so upset that when he stormed out of our house, he dropped his checkbook on the kitchen floor. I picked it up and when I looked in it to get a phone number so I could return it, I noticed his account balance was only $10,000—$40,000 short. Terry had been standing in the kitchen all this while and I showed him

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the checkbook. The sun had finally come out and the slush was rapidly melting. Terry looked out the window and said wistfully, “It really felt good to turn down fifty K.” I phoned the guy and told him I would return his checkbook in the mail. After this debacle, I became somewhat of a booking agent for Terry. Phone calls were coming in asking for Terry and it looked like he was headed for a real Renaissance. We would be browsing at a local stationery store and the young person behind the counter would ask me if that was really Terry Southern. “I read his novels in college,” they’d say, and follow him around the store in awe. The telephone kept ringing and I arranged for Terry to do readings at NYU and in poetry cafes in the East Village thanks to Darius James, who remarks about Terry, The last eight years had been hell on his health and finances. After writing such critically celebrated novels as Flash and Filigree, Candy, The Magic Christian, and Blue Movie, Terry Southern was, in the Sixties, as writer Sean Kelly once observed, one third of a hipster’s triumvirate that included John Coltrane and Lenny Bruce, which earned him a permanent place on the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album.... As a consequence of finding a fan in comic actor Peter Sellers, he went on to enjoy a Hollywood career highlighted by Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, Easy Rider.... But times had changed. The anarchic energy that had penetrated the mainstream of literature, art, music, film and journalism in the Sixties was now supplanted by the revisionist, starry-eyed buffoonery of a Forrest Gump. The idea of “Hip” had some how gotten confused with feeling shame for one’s nasal cancroids. The marketplace wasn’t getting Terry any more and simply turned its back on him.

One day I received a call from the Independent Feature Project, a nonprofit entertainment organization whose members had voted to bestow their annual Gotham Award for Lifetime Achievement to Terry. This was a very big honor and Terry was deeply humbled by it. The awards ceremony was a fundraiser for the organization and I booked an entire table. I sold tickets to Nile; Rip Torn and his daughter Angelica; Jean Stein and Torsten Wiesel; Perry Richardson; and Earl and Camilla McGrath. They all wanted to pay tribute to Terry. I also invited someone I shouldn’t have. I was full of good intentions. Unsentimental guy that he was, Terry just shook his head in bewilderment. Since the stroke he trusted my judgment. “Pretty is as pretty does,” Terry used to say, but “a fool is just a fool.” I would soon learn that the hard way. I was told it was a black tie affair, so I dusted off Terry’s thrift store tux for him and a simple evening gown for me. We arrived via a car service, along with Rip and Angelica, and had to walk the red carpet with the paparazzi flashing away. The photographers went wild over Angelica look-

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The Gotham Awards. Top: Rip Torn with his beautiful daughter, Angelica Torn. Bottom: George Plimpton (far left), Terry (far right), and David Cronenberg (left of Terry), 1994.

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ing absolutely delicious in a tight red dress and I overheard them asking each other, “Who is the gorgeous blonde on Rip Torn’s arm?” I stood aside watching what I had wrought. A reporter asked me who she was and I told him her name and who her famous parents were as they all immediately began scribbling in their notebooks.

If looks could kill! Terry is annoyed with my picture-taking as he makes his acceptance speech at the Gotham Awards, 1994.

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Terry was impressed with all the famous people who came out for the event such as David Cronenberg. I think they were more delighted to be in his presence and a number of celebrities stopped by our ringside table to chat with him. When it was time for Terry to accept his award, George Plimpton made the introduction and then helped him up to the stage as the War Room scene from Dr. Strangelove played on a giant overhead screen. Terry, all white-haired and bearded, looking like Santa Claus, gave a brief thank you speech as I was snapping away with my Instamatic camera. At one point he glared down at me and I knew then he was annoyed with my over-enthusiasm. After the ceremony ended, we headed to the Gramercy Hotel to spend the night. The next day we met Perry Richardson for lunch at the National Arts Club. Not a fan of exotic cuisine, Perry loved the simple English-type food there and always cleaned his plate. We all were casually dressed and bleary-eyed from the previous night of partying. Terry carried his award with him and placed it in the middle of the table. It was a clear Plexiglas rectangle with the Empire State Building imprisoned inside. Perry brought a giant carpetbag full of dirty laundry, which he discreetly put on the floor beside his chair. At first we were the only guests but then the room began to fill up. A well-dressed gentleman about Terry’s age came over to our table just as we were finishing. Looking at Terry, he shouted, “Sir, you are not properly dressed for this establishment.” Now red in the face, he turned to Perry and said, “And neither are you, young man.” Then his eyes fell on Perry’s halfopen bag of dirty clothes. “What in God’s name is that?” he bellowed, pointing to the laundry. We tried to explain that we were ragged from celebrating Terry’s winning a Lifetime Achievement Award from the night before and I held up the trophy as proof. He was not impressed and stormed off, no doubt to complain to the management. We beat a hasty retreat and once on the street we all broke up laughing. Terry said, “Once I apologized to Brendan Gill about the shoes I was wearing to some function. Brendan replied, ‘A gentleman does not look at another gentleman’s shoes.’” I left Perry and Terry giggling on the sidewalk while I fetched the car. We headed back to the farm while I suppose poor Perry went in search of a laundromat. Terry received a lot of press at this time and neighbors who we hardly knew invited us to a garden party they were throwing. They wanted to socialize with the great Terry Southern. Terry was not in good shape that day but it was a beautiful late spring afternoon and the party was nearby. I thought we should go. I could barely help him out of the car and up the driveway to the house. But once inside, he began to feel like his old self and was enter-

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Terry and I enjoy the sunshine in Gramercy Park the morning after the Gotham Awards, 1994.

taining the guests with his stories. Unfortunately, Terry had too much wine and got drunk very quickly. I thought we’d better leave. It was even more difficult getting him back into the car since I was not sober either. I glanced back and saw our neighbors staring at us with looks of disapproval on their faces. When we got home I somehow got him out of the car and devised a way to keep Terry on his feet. He was a big guy and I knew if he fell over I wouldn’t be able to help lift him up. Sure enough he staggered and fell under the blooming Forsythia bush. I burst out laughing and couldn’t get him up. Too drunk to do anything else, I went into the house and passed out. When I woke up a few hours later I hurried to his room and found him safe and sound asleep in his bed. In the morning I went downstairs and looked out the front door to see how he managed to get to bed and discovered a meandering trail on our dirt driveway from the Forsythia bush to the front door—like a giant sloth had slithered all the way. With summer fast approaching, I wanted to make sure Terry didn’t have to go through the humiliation of reporting for unemployment. I set up for him another writers workshop at the White Hart Inn. Some nice people enrolled including two filmmakers from Yale University, Jill Cutler and Jeremy Brecher, who asked Terry to speak at the school. They were just com-

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pleting work on a documentary called The Amistad Revolt: All We Want Is Make Us Free. Terry had been invited to Yale thirty years before when it was not coed. I remember that then we were put up in a suite and met in the dean’s house for a cocktail reception before dinner. He had a charming wife, and there were a few other women in the room. After having drinks, we started to walk to the dining room and I took Terry’s arm. Someone said, “Oh, no. He goes that way and you come with us.” I was perplexed and then realized the women couldn’t dine together with the men. We were segregated! That was the most primitive thing that ever happened to me. Jill and Jeremy knew how frail Terry was so they set up the least stressful session they could. Clips from Terry’s movies would be screened and then there would be a question-and-answer period. If he felt up to it, he could also read from any of his works. I told Terry the agenda and he decided to prepare something to recite. As the day came closer, he became agitated because he couldn’t finish writing his piece. When I got him and his bags settled into the backseat of the car, he was still furiously writing away. I headed south for the highway that crosses Connecticut and then headed for Hartford in the fast lane. Terry was getting more and more upset. I looked in the rearview mirror and his head was down as he was scribbling away. He finally said, “I can’t do it! I am not prepared.” I then thought I heard the back door of the car open and the wind rush in. I reminded him that he didn’t have to read and only answer questions if he wanted. He condescendingly replied, “If you arranged that, then you’re a genius.” He didn’t jump out of our moving car but if I was back there I would have pushed him out myself, I was so mad. But we both settled down and continued our drive to the college. Yale University in 1995 was a lot different than it was in 1966. We were put up in a hotel and taken to lunch the next day where both men and women, all admirers of Terry’s, dined around a long table. He was feeling a bit ill but really enjoyed himself. The program went extremely well. There were a lot of people in attendance, mostly men with gray ponytails, which I found odd. Darius James was there, looking quite dapper in a white suit and his dreadlocks. The next day Darius’ father invited us to his home for a wonderful barbeque. All his African-American neighbors came to hang out with Terry. It reminded Terry of his youth in Texas and he felt at home there. Also that summer, Jean Stein invited us to her apartment for a cocktail party, probably at the request of Jessica Mitford, who was visiting New York and was a big fan of Terry’s work. She was a political radical who wrote The

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Darius James and Terry dining at a Japanese restaurant, ca. 1994.

The East Village writers’ scene in the Nineties welcomed Terry thanks to Darius James, ca. 1994.

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American Way of Death, which exposed the funeral industry for taking advantage of grieving families. Later it was part of the inspiration for Tony Richardson’s film version of The Loved One, which was the book that Evelyn Waugh wrote. We hadn’t set foot in Jean’s home for about twenty years. Terry and Jessica were delighted to see each other. She was very jolly, and described watching Dr. Strangelove recently in Paris with French subtitles. Terry was in pretty good shape that night and enjoyed himself. As usual we were practically the last ones to leave and as I was helping him put on his coat in the hallway, Jean suddenly began ranting and raving at Terry. We were taken aback as was this tall blond woman who hadn’t left yet either. Jean’s face was beet red and she said that unless Terry withdrew his lawsuit against her friend Dennis Hopper, she would drop him from the foundation and cancel his stipend checks. Terry and I both tried to calm her down and explain that it was not Terry’s lawsuit but Rip Torn’s and that we were called to testify on Rip’s behalf because Dennis had lied on national television, slandering Rip’s character. No amount of explaining could appease her as she was very hurt and upset. I gave up trying to reason with her and went back to sorting out Terry’s coat, cane, book bag, and glasses so we could get the hell out of there. Terry was leaning on his cane swaying back and forth while the other woman nervously paced. I could see the pain in Terry’s face caused by the unwarranted verbal assault by Jean. We finally made it out of her apartment and into the car. I drove home as Terry retreated from all the unpleasantness by falling into a deep sleep in the back seat. This was the last he ever saw of Jean Stein. Their friendship ended that night. The small but essential and appreciated weekly checks stopped coming. And despite Jean’s demands we gave our depositions on behalf of Rip Torn, who went on to win his suit against Hopper. But losing Jean as a friend was a terrible blow to Terry, and he was going downhill fast. Also that summer we received a phone call out of the blue from an Italian friend of actress Tina Aumont. We hadn’t seen her in decades. Still married to Christian Marquand, whom we also hadn’t seen in years, she was coming to New York and wanted to meet with Terry and me. We arranged to have dinner with her and that friend in a Japanese restaurant in Greenwich Village. Despite her gorgeous looks and pedigree, Tina never became a major movie star. The western she was working on when I met her in 1965, Texas Across the River, turned out to be her only Hollywood film. Tina went back to Europe and worked steadily in the Italian and French cinema. I wasn’t familiar with any of her films except Fellini’s Satyricon. Tina was in her late forties when we saw her and she still looked as lovely as she did when I first met her in 1965. We laughed and reminisced about the past. I thought that it was odd that she was wearing long, elegant black

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gloves that went up almost her entire arm. When she excused herself to go to the ladies room, her companion informed us that Tina was a heroin addict and was embarrassed about her track marks. He nervously went on to say that it was easy to get heroin in Europe but he couldn’t score for her in New York because it is illegal. We said our goodbyes and that was the last we ever heard or saw of Tina, who died from a pulmonary embolism in October 2006. A week before Terry passed away, we came into the city for a dinner, and I couldn’t find a hotel room anywhere. Terry had to teach at Columbia the next day and I resorted to the Hotel Chelsea. Terry got its longtime manager Stanley Bard on the phone and he said we could stay in a room that was under renovation. We got there quite late, and Terry said to the ancient night clerk behind the desk that he wanted “the Sid and Nancy Suite.” The old guy didn’t laugh, but I did. We got the key and went up to a room that was truly demolished. There was only sub-flooring left, with a splintered board as a bridge to the bathroom. At eight-thirty in the morning the phone rang, and Stanley’s cheerful voice told us we had thirty minutes to vacate the room because the workmen were going to be there. Terry didn’t start teaching until two in the afternoon. As we were checking out, Terry said, “I guess you’re going to charge the full price, right, Stanley?” He laughed and said, “Of course.” I got us into my poor old Honda and proceeded to kill the next five hours driving aimlessly around New York City with Terry suffering in the back seat. I always let him off at the broad steps across from Barnard because that was the easiest way to Dodge Hall where his classroom was located. Watching from the car, I didn’t see him on the steps, and looked around for him. He was steadying himself against a wall of the school, trying to catch his breath, and then he slowly began climbing the stairs. A few weeks prior, he almost stumbled down the stairs but luckily Darius James was there to balance him. Per Darius, when he asked Terry how he was doing, he replied, “I’m flatlining.” The following Wednesday, Terry wouldn’t make it to the top landing.

13. A Grand Guy Comes to the End of the Road Terry and I left the farm on Sunday, October 22, 1995, to meet up with Perry Richardson in New York City. He was in town to celebrate the release of his book Virgin: The History of Virgin Records, which Terry collaborated on with him. Perry put us up at the Paramount Hotel on West 45th Street. The Paramount had recently been entirely gutted and made into a shiny yuppie hotel with the smallest rooms possible. The windows were sealed shut, so there was not much oxygen. Terry was a big guy, and he got most of it. Perry met us in the lobby and checked us in so I didn’t have to use my credit card. He was the only person during Terry’s later years to bring projects to him, cover his expenses, and pay him for his writing contributions. Our finances had been at a new low since the fiasco of the re-mortgaging of the farm two years before. I couldn’t imagine at the time money being any tighter, but it happened. Our mortgage payment had gone up $500 a month. I had to cope with it, and still get Terry to Columbia to teach, and to Sloan Kettering for check-ups. When staying the night in the city, we couldn’t just crash at some charitable person’s place like Larry Rivers’ or Jill Krementz’s like we used to. Terry was now too ill and needed a proper bed and a bathroom, and he walked slowly, with a cane. He spent most of his time at the farm in his bed, going over his students’ scripts, propped up with pillows and a tilt top table, recovering from the previous Wednesday’s teaching session. It really drained him, and he didn’t have the energy to pursue his own writing. He had two orange cats to keep him company. He ate most of his meals in bed, and I would bring food on two trays and join him. If he felt up to it he would come downstairs to the dining room. He slept a lot, and his students would come by, brought by Darius James, and sit on the patio talking in quiet voices, hoping he would wake up and come down. Sometimes he’d muster the strength to join them for a glass of wine while entertaining them with stories, and would feel young again. Perry made arrangements to meet us for Sunday dinner at the Russian Tea Room, Terry’s favorite place except for Elaine’s, since Perry had never been there before. He brought the beautiful and talented Angelica Torn, 244

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whom I had known since she was two years old. Perry had first met Angelica at the Gotham Awards and became smitten with her. Though he was married, he pursued her. Angelica enjoyed the attention, but had no intention of going beyond just a platonic friendship with him. We ordered Terry’s usual favorite meal of blini, caviar, and vodka in round-bottomed glasses, so you can’t set them down. I remember telling everyone that while I was strolling down the street, I thought I was being pursued by a long-stretch white limo that wanted to run me down. Terry said, “Nonsense, Gail. If anybody wanted to run you down, they’d just use your silly old Honda Civic!” Angelica thought this was so funny that she spurted red wine all over the table. It was quite a jolly dinner, and Perry loved it so much so that he decided we should come back again on Tuesday. In the meantime, Perry was organizing a release party in London the following week for his upcoming book about Virgin Records and was making arrangements to fly us to London to attend. Perry had some shiny copies of the book with him, and was looking forward to spending time in London with Terry. He dropped us off at our hotel and said we would meet for lunch the next day. The Paramount had a mezzanine where they served food. The rooms were much too small for anything but sleeping. After lunching with Terry and Perry, I left them to plan the trip while I set out to buy Terry a new jacket at a nifty store on Fifth Avenue. We usually shopped at thrift shops and tag sales, but for this occasion I would pull out the credit card. I bought him a soft charcoal gray sports coat that could be used for many occasions. This week in October of 1995 was perfect—the sky was blue, the sun was warm, and New York City was in quite good shape after decades of neglect and decay. Walking up the street with the sun behind me, I chased my shadow up the sidewalk, which sparkled like glass. That October it seemed the trees’ autumn colors got richer and richer as the month went on, even in the middle of the city. I hurried back to the hotel with my purchase for Terry. He and Perry were still on the mezzanine chatting and laughing up a storm. There was no place else to go so I joined them for drinks. Terry tried on his new sports jacket, which fit perfectly. On Monday night we went to Elaine’s. A party was arranged for the following week to celebrate the Virgin book and to send off Terry and me to London. Elaine loved her writers, and tolerated their wives and girlfriends, as long as they didn’t do anything too gauche. Her generosity was endless, and writers had tabs there running for years—I know Terry did. One night, long ago, there was a terrible blizzard, and we were heading back to Canaan very late, with me at the wheel. Terry insisted on stopping at Elaine’s even

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though it was out of the way. Elaine was there counting her receipts while one waiter bustled about clearing up. She gazed outside the window to watch the heavily falling snow, turned to us, and pushed a large bill across the bar, saying, “Here, you may need this tonight.” We drove a little way up the West Side Highway and checked into a motel for the night. That Tuesday afternoon Terry was to meet with a young man named Jimmy Vines who was to become his new literary agent. Nile had talked him into dumping Sterling Lord, whom he had been with forever, and who never did anything for him except collect his percentage. Perry and I accompanied Terry (looking quite dapper in his new tweed jacket) to the meeting. Introductions were made, and Perry had some of the glossy Virgin books to pass around. We sat down for drinks and had a very pleasant time. Terry signed with Jimmy. It was a wise decision. Jimmy made a deal with Grove Press to re-release all of Terry’s books with redesigned covers. I think Terry was his first and only client at the time. He is now quite successful. That night Terry, Perry, Angelica, and I met again at the Russian Tea Room or the RTR as it was called by its regulars. Angelica was just stunning wearing a crimson dress. We sat on the red banquette and ordered the exact same drinks and food as we did the previous time. As the waiter, all dressed up in his Cossack uniform, was serving us, he dropped a bombshell: Fighting back tears, he said, “The RTR is closing on Sunday—forever.” We were taken aback. Devastated, we toasted the end of an era. The waiter joined us in the toast since there was no one else in the room. He came back with beautiful, sturdy laminated paper bags with the RTR logo and patterns, with golden rope handles, and we all got one as a keepsake. The next morning was Wednesday. Terry had two classes with six hours of teaching—two to five in the afternoon and six to nine in the evening. This was my fourth year as “chauffeur,” and I was proud of the fact that Terry had never been late to class. He missed two times in all those years, once because he had the flu, and once because the weather was so bad I had to turn back. As we were getting ready, we discovered that Terry’s passport had expired, and we needed to renew it tout suite! The passport office is in the Rockefeller Center area, so I helped Terry into his new sports jacket and then into the back seat of the small Honda after we had said our goodbyes to Perry who was on his way back to London. I found a parking space on the street, believe it or not, and threaded Terry through the crowds gathered around the windows of NBC’s Today Show, where the pandemonium caused Terry to swoon. We got into the quiet building and up to a high floor. It was a small room, with a circuitous path laid out, like in a bank. Terry was obviously in trouble, and the few people there let him cut the line and go straight to the window. Everyone seemed

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to be aware that he was in bad shape; he looked like he was 140 years old, instead of 71, because he wasn’t getting enough oxygen to his brain. The nice people at the passport office filled out the forms for him and sent us on our way. I had to steer him through the throngs of people on the streets to get back to the car. I figured some Japanese food might straighten him out, and headed for the nearest restaurant. There’s a handy fire hydrant at the bottom of the stone stairs at Columbia University, directly across the street from Barnard College. It’s the easiest way to get to Dodge Hall, where Terry had his first three-hour class. I would park there and let Terry out. A few years prior, when I was sharing a loft with Joan Saks, Terry would spend a night there once in awhile. One day he was heading out of town and had been using my car. When I got to the apartment there was a note from him, which said, “I parked the car right out front, by the fireplug.” I looked out the window and sure enough there was my car exactly where he said it was and right below a sign that indicated it was a tow-away zone with a $500 fine for parking there. The week before I dropped Terry off, I didn’t see him mounting the stone stairs and looked around for him. He was leaning against the building trying to get his energy up for the climb. This time I watched carefully, and about halfway up he collapsed; his cane, book bag and glasses went flying. With the jazz station on the radio blaring and the keys still in the ignition, I bolted from the car (leaving the driver’s door ajar) and ran to him as fast as I could move. I collected his things, and with the pressure ballet lift I had taught him, I put my hand under his and lifted this six-foot, 170-pound man to the top of the stairs in a flash, as if he was a feather. I settled him at the top landing, propped up by an unused door, and looked around for some help. Everyone was rushing to classes and seemed not to notice us. I started to yell for help. Eventually someone slowed down enough to notice this sick old man and a desperate woman. I think it was an older person who finally assisted me in getting Terry over to one of the tables under a dark blue umbrella in the renovated lobby. He called 911 and stayed with Terry as I rushed into the assistant dean’s office to explain why Terry had to miss class that day. In the four years that Terry had been teaching at Columbia, I would notice an ambulance lurking about. I would look at it askance and think, “Why is it always here?” I found out that day. The dean accompanied me back to the lobby where we found Terry, in a wheelchair, with an oxygen mask on, being administered to by an angel of a young paramedic. I felt the assistant dean wobble and almost faint at the sight. A policeman showed up in the deserted lobby as everyone was in class. I explained to him that I had left the car by a hydrant at the bottom of the stairs with the door open and

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the keys in the ignition. He said not to worry. The paramedic told me to get in the car and meet him at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital, which was around the corner and across the street from Columbia University. Racing back to my Honda where it was still idling away, which was a miracle in itself, I zoomed around the corner to the hospital and found a parking spot, which was another small gift. I rushed inside the emergency entrance and there was Terry, on a gurney in a hallway, with a small oxygen mask, looking a lot better, and quite happily writing away on his yellow pad, waiting for a room. I breathed a sigh of relief. A very pretty blond student of Terry’s named Caroline, who knew how to get into the hospital because she had been married to a doctor for twelve years, came rushing over after hearing the news and left Terry some magazines to read. An intern, who looked about 14 years old, came to examine Terry and seemed puzzled. Terry was wheeled around a corner, out of the traffic of the hallway, to wait for a room. I had been there for hours and was told there was nothing more I could do. I said goodbye to Terry and left for the night. I always thought when this crisis came that I would phone Larry Rivers, one of Terry’s closest friends. But my mind was totally blank, and the only phone number I could remember was Amy Wright and Rip Torn’s. Amy answered the phone and I told her what had happened. She said of course I could stay with her and told me to come down. It was October 25 and the sun was just setting over New Jersey, so it must have been about six-thirty at night. The sky was purple and it was rush hour, the traffic was bumper to bumper, and I was crying so hard I couldn’t see out the windshield. I don’t know how I ever got to Washington Square. After I pulled myself together, I found a parking spot and then walked over to Amy’s apartment. I rang the bell and she buzzed me in. When I got to her floor I found the door open so I went in. Amy and Rip were in the kitchen. I’ve always tried to keep my emotions in check in front of other people but the second I saw them a flood of tears broke out again and I collapsed into Rip’s arms. He embraced me. They gave me a bed. It had been a long day. The next morning the telephone rang at seven-thirty. I knew it couldn’t be for anyone else in the apartment but me so I ran for the phone before it could wake everyone. Terry was on the other end bellowing, “You got to get me out of here or they will kill me!” I threw my clothes on and ran to the car without a word to Rip or Amy. I drove uptown as fast as I could and found his room. He was on the heart and lung floor, by the window, in a sunny room with two beds. His roommate was an older Spanish man who looked in worse shape than Terry and who had just had a heart operation. He spoke

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no English. I didn’t speak Spanish. But when he told me he was going home soon, I somehow understood and replied in Spanish that Terry was not. I will never know why I said that or for that matter how I knew to say it in Spanish. Terry was insisting he wanted to be transferred to another hospital, so I called Dr. Rossman, our long-time physician. He came right over and was pacing nervously around the room while reading Terry’s chart. He finally told Terry that it was an excellent hospital and he would be better off to stay there. I asked him, out of earshot from Terry, what was on the chart and he suggested that I speak directly to Terry’s attending doctor. The nurses were taking a lot of blood tests, and Terry finally calmed down and actually seemed quite cheerful. Caroline, his student, came back to visit, and brought a piece of peach pie, which caused his blood levels to go off the charts. The nurses were all running around trying to figure out what happened. Terry didn’t want any of his friends to see him in the hospital so he had no other visitors at first other than her and me. In the afternoon I asked the doctor if I could go home to feed the animals back on the farm. He said no, that the next forty-eight hours were crucial and I should stick around. Later they moved Terry to a room down the hall in front of the nurse’s station and hooked him up to a number of machines including the one with the green graph that tells whether you’re flatlining. A young doctor came by, and I introduced him to Terry. He was a big fan, and went to shake hands with Terry, but got tangled up in the stethoscope and other stuff hanging around his neck, and an armful of clipboards. Terry tried to help by raising himself up and reaching for the doctor’s hand but couldn’t reach. It was like an absurdly funny scene out of one of Terry’s stories. With every passing moment Terry was looking paler and paler. One time he stiffened and said to me, “Something is happening.” I asked him what he meant. He replied, “I don’t know, they’re doing so much and I feel like I’m going somewhere.” I tried to reassure him that the doctors were more concerned for the person in the other bed, who was behind a curtain. He sighed and laid back down, seeming to be relieved. I now wish I had questioned him more. I don’t know why I did that. It showed a lack of curiosity that is not like me. I only wanted to reassure him that he was okay, which he wasn’t. I was lying and evasive—a coward. The man I loved for thirty years was dying and I didn’t have the guts to face it. I had been in the hospital since early that morning and was exhausted. With Terry resting comfortably, I headed for the waiting room down a long hall. As I passed the nurses station I saw the young clumsy doctor sound asleep with his head on the desk and his eyeglasses askew. A massive pile of

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books were open and stacked all around him. I imagined that he was trying to find out how to save Terry’s life. I reclined on a cherry-red plastic couch, which my cheek stuck to, until I took off my sweater and made a pillow. I only slept for a few hours, then made my way to check on Terry. I went back and forth every few hours. That was how the night passed. It was now Friday morning and I had to move the car from one side of the street to another to avoid getting a ticket. I felt lucky because I found a parking spot right in front of the main gate with a police kiosk to the right of it. Crime was still a problem in the city at the time, and the street was filled with homeless, desperate people, begging. I felt secure leaving the car as it was full with our clothes and papers safely locked in the trunk. Terry was still adamant that he didn’t want any visitors but me. But I thought his friends and family should be aware of his situation. As soon as it was late enough in the morning, I took a pile of quarters to the pay phone in the hall and started to dial. I first called Terry’s ex-wife and told her what was happening. She said she’d notify their son Nile who was living in Boulder, Colorado. I was relieved—help was on the way! I then called Ellen Adler who was indecisive about coming. When Ellen did arrive, she told me, “I called my friend Cornelia Foss to ask if I should come to the hospital. Cornelia paused for a long time, then said, ‘Go!’” I didn’t want to overwhelm Terry so I told Amy and Rip not to come. Rip assured me that Terry was a fighter and that he just knew he’d be fine. Terry’s ex-wife came by around noon, on her lunch break from her job. When we walked into the hospital room we found Terry all hooked up to various machines and could do nothing. A beautiful teaching doctor then entered with a gaggle of residents and asked why her patient was in pain. “He is on an oxygen mask, and they don’t want to suppress his breathing,” a bright student responded. The doctor demanded more drugs and went to the main desk. We followed and I introduced Terry’s ex-wife. “Oh, one for each arm,” the doctor beamed. She then brought us into a conference room and we sat around a small table. She asked if Terry had ever worked in a mine. Not expecting that, I said no. Then she asked if he had ever been involved in industrial farming. I tried to lighten the mood and quipped, “As far as I know, he has never been off a bar stool.” Ignoring my bad joke, Nile’s mother said that Terry had taken a lot of Dexedrine in his youth. But the doctor quickly dismissed that as a cause for Terry’s condition. There were obviously no answers there for the doctor and she then explained to us in detail Terry’s ailment. When he was first admitted they thought he was having a heart attack but after examination they realized his lungs were calcifying. This explained his shortness of breath and I knew it was serious. Since we had no more questions for her, the doctor dismissed us.

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I went to take care of the car. It was high noon and the streets were crowded. I got into the Honda reaching for the coins to feed the meter and there weren’t any. I looked around the interior and sensed that something was wrong. I got out, opened the trunk and, to my horror it was empty. I turned to a female cop who was stationed at the kiosk, and dissolved into her arms crying. I explained that my long-time companion was dying in the hospital and that our belongings were stolen. She tried to be supportive and console me by saying, “Maybe they’ll do the right thing and bring your overnight bags back.” I looked at her as though she was crazy at the time, but I was so bereft that I couldn’t respond. When I got back to the hospital, Terry was in a dither. He said nervously, “Something’s happening!” He was flailing about and I needed to calm him. I asked what he meant. “They’re doing too much,” he answered. I couldn’t face telling him the truth so I said, “Oh, no, Terry, they’re doing much more for other people!” That seemed to reassure him immediately. Relaxed, he laid back onto his hospital pillow. He was relieved to hear that everything was all right—but it wasn’t. I went to make telephone calls from the pay phone at the end of the hall. Terry’s ex-wife came back and his doctor advised us to fan him with whatever was available. I grabbed a New Yorker and began fanning away. It was good to know that magazine was useful for something. Terry asked for sushi for dinner. It was his favorite food so I set out in the setting sun to get him some. When I returned, his doctor went through each piece of sushi before she would let him eat it. “This is okay. This is not,” she’d say. Someone said once, “It took twenty-five years to kill Terry,” and now the time had come. An aide was assigned to fan him all through the night. She didn’t speak English and apparently came all the way from Queens in a driving rainstorm. When I made my “rounds” from my cherry-red plastic couch in the middle of the night, I found our fanner had fallen asleep while an Indian doctor was shouting at Terry, “Mr. Southern, don’t you know you are dying?” Terry was thrashing about in anger and frustration. Gnashing and pulling on his many cords, he was trying to get out of the bed and kill this guy. It was a moment out of Jonathan Swift. I pulled the doctor into the hallway and told him that if he didn’t stop, Terry was going to take him and that room apart. “Are you telling me how to do my job?” he asked. I replied sternly, “Yes, I am and if you don’t stop bullying Terry I am going to report you to your superior.” He turned and marched up the hall, while a night nurse just smirked. Saturday morning I awoke from my makeshift bed on the couch in the hospital’s waiting room to a commotion coming from the direction of Terry’s room. I ran down the hallway just in time to see him on a gurney being

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swiftly wheeled out of his room to the elevator directly across the hall, attended by doctors, nurses, and orderlies trotting alongside. They passed by me and I gasped in shock. Terry was strapped in a straitjacket with an oxygen mask over his face. Panicking, he was struggling and thrashing around, trying to get away. They were heading for the big double doors across the way, which was marked Intensive Care Unit. The doors swung open and they disappeared inside. Terry was fighting for his life. I went back down the hall to the pay phone. I called Nile’s mother and she said that she was waiting for her son to arrive. The previous day’s flight was too expensive so he was to arrive today instead. I spoke with Ellen Adler who promised to come right away. I went downstairs to check on the car, which was now safe and sound in a nifty lot close by and at bargain price if you happened to be dying in the hospital. We all showed up almost simultaneously. Everyone was pacing in circles and worrying, hoping Nile would get there before Terry died. We found ourselves standing shoulder to shoulder in a large circular room with many doors, one of which led to Terry’s room. Ellen began singing “Three Little Maids Are We.” She was always amusing and tried to lighten the mood. I went downstairs to smoke a cigarette, a bad habit that I had taken up recently, and look for Nile. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I needed a quiet place for a moment. I walked towards the East River. The street was a cul de sac. At the end was a church. If ever anyone needed sanctuary at this time, I did. I walked through an autumn garden and into the chapel. I cried, but no help came; perhaps I had been an unbeliever far too long. I just needed a quiet place for a moment and sat there reflecting on my life with Terry. We had been together almost from the moment we met on the set of The Loved One. I didn’t know how I would survive without him. I went back to the hospital and was informed that there was no change with Terry. Moments later I went back to the street to again look for Nile, who had decided to take the subway from the airport. It was getting late and there was still no sign of him. I guess while I was away, everyone decided that I needed some real rest. Terry’s ex-wife generously offered me a key to her apartment. Since I hadn’t slept since the previous Wednesday, I took it and thanked her. I think I took a cab and after letting myself in I couldn’t believe what was before my eyes. Smack dab in the middle of her living room was my Yamaha piano—the one I had bought so many years ago with the help of David Amram. I thought, “How in the hell did it end up here?” Too tired to dwell on such trivialities, I found the spare bedroom, crawled into bed, and fell fast asleep. When I awoke in the morning, the sun was shining and I found Nile and his mother in the kitchen having coffee. I joined them, and we made a

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plan for going to the hospital. It was decided that I would go first, so as not to overtax the Intensive Care Unit by arriving en masse. I arrived at the hospital and went straight to the big circular room with doors all around, which looked like it came straight from the pages of a Hermann Hesse novel. I went to the desk in the middle of the room and explained to a beautiful red-haired doctor why I was there. I noticed a commotion to my right, and saw Terry’s feet sticking out from under a flimsy blanket,

How I will always remember Terry—writing away in his study, ca. 1989.

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behind a half-drawn curtain, with a beehive of activity going on around him. I asked the doctor if Terry would know if I was there. She said she didn’t know because his organs were shutting down. The staff was flailing about Terry. I dared not go near—I could see his feet. That’s the last I ever saw of him. I knew that Nile was on his way. I thought of the starving animals on the farm, and if I should give Terry private time with his son. For thirty years Terry tried to shield me from unpleasantness—his marriage; his IRS troubles; his lawsuit versus Playboy, etc. I know he would have wanted to shield me from his death too so I left him to spend his final moments with Nile. At the time I thought it was a good idea—or was it just an excuse to leave because I really couldn’t deal with his passing? I’ll never know the answer to that. I went to the parking garage to retrieve my car. After handing my ticket to the older attendant, I dissolved into tears but he seemed not to notice. I got into the Honda and headed for the West Side Highway. I guess it was about 11:30 on that Sunday morning of October 29. I was headed north— first on a fast-moving thruway, and then on a winding two-lane highway. The road was gleaming from the sun in that late October way. I couldn’t believe that I left Terry behind. I fretted the entire way. “Should I turn back or go on?” I truly didn’t know what to do. Needing gas, I stopped at a station along the parkway. I noticed a pay phone. “Should I call? Should I just turn around?” I left a man’s son alone with his dying father. I did it on purpose—I thought it was the right thing to do. I made my choice and I was not turning back now. The farm was still an hour and a half away (“Beyond the commuter belt,” as Terry would always say relieved). I had a lot of time to think. The sun was high in the sky and all around me the dense forest was on fire with autumn colors. The path that wound through the Berkshire Hills to the farm was one that I had been following for thirty years. As one goes deeper and deeper into New England farm country, the roads become narrow and winding, with fields and low stone fences built without mortar. They’ve been balanced there for a couple of hundred years. My car knew the thoroughfare so well that it seemed I was a passenger and it was driving itself. “The Long and Winding Road” that I had maneuvered drunk, sober, exhausted and at every hour of the day and night, during every season, took me home.

Epilogue Terry died that Sunday night, October 29, at 11:30 P.M. Strangely, it was the exact same time that his favorite restaurant The Russian Tea Room closed its doors to the public or, as Terry would describe it, “the end of an era.” Some would feel the same way about his passing. I was in a haze for weeks after Terry’s death so I was thankful that Nile took care of his cremation; his ashes were sprinkled in the pond on the farm he loved so. I used to notice in other women who have lost their mates a kind of shell shock—a post–Vietnam syndrome kind of daze about them. I now understood what they were going through. I remember driving places with Terry ensconced in the back seat of the car and me looking in the rearview mirror, checking to see if he was breathing. Weeks after his passing, I still found myself unconsciously peering in the mirror, searching for him in the back, hoping to find him asleep and then sadly realizing he was really gone. In January of 1996, Nile’s mother arranged a memorial for Terry in Manhattan. About 100 invited friends of his attended as well as Nile and me. A few of them spoke including David Amram, Peter Matthiessen, Rip Torn, Kurt Vonnegut, and Larry Rivers, who brought his saxophone and played a tribute to his dear friend. (Unfortunately he chose Terry’s two most hated songs in the world, “Send in the Clowns” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”) To make matters worse, Larry also sang them a cappella. It was so bad it was funny and Terry would have appreciated the irony immensely. A reception was held afterwards but I was whisked away by “a friend of the family” to have dinner with him alone. I have always suspected that my presence at this gathering was not welcomed and he was asked to keep me away. I lived on the farm for a few more months while continuing with my ballet school. In May, I was informed that I had thirty days to vacate the property. I was taken aback because I was told I could live there until it was sold. I was teaching ballet twelve hours a day so had to scramble to find an apartment that took pets because classes didn’t end until June 30. I began organizing my possessions, making sure I did not take anything considered the property of the estate. One day while I was packing I was asked out of the blue if I wanted to sell my Larry Rivers painting because, supposedly, an 255

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oblivious handyman hired to scrape the kitchen floor said that he wanted to purchase it. I may be naïve but I wasn’t stupid and, smiling sweetly, said no. The farm was finally sold for a little over $450,000 but I never saw a penny. According to my attorney, my share went to cover Terry’s back taxes. I didn’t like or trust him and never learned the full story. And like Terry, I wasn’t shrewd about business matters. My subsequent lawyers weren’t very effective either. Meanwhile my relationship with the estate was strained. Despite the fact that the will was still in probate, I left Connecticut for Vancouver to spend time with my ill mother. When Rip Torn learned that I planned to return to Canada in the autumn, driving a U-Haul holding all my possessions with a trailer hooked to the back carrying my Honda Civic, he shouted, “You can’t drive across Canada in November!” I should have heeded his advice. I skidded off the icy road and crashed somewhere between Longlac and Thunder Bay in Ontario, destroying my car and many antiques. My mother died in July of 1997 and the following month Rip called and said, “I think you’re off the scope. I’m sending you a ticket and you can stay at my house in Lakeville. I’ll pay you $250 a week to oversee the property.” Rip has a reputation for being this gruff guy but sometimes he can be very sweet. I thanked him and took him up on his offer. I was eager to get back as all my friends were still there and I wanted to wrap up the probate. Well, probate lasted eight years! What should have been a simple matter turned into a nightmare. I was not getting full disclosure and really didn’t have any idea what was going on. We’d probably still be in court if it wasn’t for Joe LoGiudice. After hearing about the mess the estate was in, Joe tried to contact me in 2003 because he wanted to protect his copyright in the half dozen or so screenplays he had written with Terry. I didn’t reply and he tried again a few weeks later. Once we connected and I explained the situation, Joe took charge and was able to come up with a solution agreeable to all of us. Nile and Joe became co-trustees of the Terry Southern Literary Trust and I was named the secretary as well as a co-beneficiary with Nile. Joe was so brilliant to resolve this and did it all on a telephone from his home office in Hollywood, while we were in an attorney’s office in Connecticut. Though the estate problem was solved, its finances were in trouble. Thankfully director Steven Soderbergh came along and purchased Terry’s papers. He then donated them to The New York Public Library. Joe contracted cancer and passed away in September of 2008 so I do not know what the future holds for me but I will not let it disrupt my life. I am residing contently in New York City again and am enjoying my free time attending concerts, seeing ballets, and just strolling through the beautiful gardens of Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan. I am even having fun with my newfound “cult movie actress status,” as my beach and Elvis movies have

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had a resurgence thanks to DVD and the Internet. And I have returned to the big screen playing a dotty old woman in Lucky Days (2008), co-directed by Tony Torn and Angelica Torn who also wrote the screenplay and stars in the lead role. And luckily, I have loyal, wonderful friends such as Rip and Amy, Angelica, Tony, David Amram, Darius, John Kim, and Priscilla and David Bowen, who have stuck by me through the years and whom I see on a regular basis, as well as new friends Kati, Luke, and Tom and Ernie DeLia. I think Terry would be happy for me.

Bibliography Archerd, Army. “A Look Back: Cover Stories Through the Years: 1967—The Trip Falls Flat.” Variety, Nov. 8, 2007. http://www.variety.com/index.asp?lay out=variety100&content=jump& jump=article&articleID=VR111797558 2&category=1924. Boughton, Kathryn. “Peter Reilly Speaks at a Forum in Salisbury: Case Still Haunts.” Litchfield County Times, August 15, 2005. Cousins, Mark. Scene by Scene: Film Actors and Directors Discuss Their Work. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2002. Cummings, Richard. “The Paris Review: A CIA Propaganda Organ.” www.ven usproject.com/ethics_in_action/h_fic tio_of_th_tate.html. Fonda, Peter, Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern. Easy Rider. Screenplay (unpublished). 1967. Golden, Mike. “...Now Dig This ... Interview with Terry Southern.” Creative Screenwriting, Winter 1996: 61–67. Krassner, Paul. “An Interview with Terry Southern.” The Realist, Spring 1996:1, 2, 6, 7. Hill, Lee. “Interview with a Grant Guy.” The Write Stuff. http://www.altx.com/ interviews/terry.southern.html. Lisanti, Tom. Drive-in Dream Girls: A Galaxy of B-Movie Starlets of the Sixties. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003. _____. Hollywood Surf and Beach Movies: The First Wave, 1959–1969. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005. LoBrutto, Vincent. Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. New York: Da Capo Press, 1999. Merrill, Sam. “Mason Hoffenberg Gets in

a Few Good Licks.” Playboy, November 1973: 100, 110, 242–50. New York Times. “Credit Disputed.” August 1, 1998. Richardson, Perry, and Terry Southern. The Early Stones: Legendary Photographs of a Band in the Making, 1963– 1973. New York: Hyperion, 1992. Rivers, Larry, and Arnold Weinstein. What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. Robertson, James C. The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action, 1913– 1975. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Savage, David. “Tribeca Film Festival: Dennis Hopper Makes Surprise Appearance at Screening of Night Tide, His First Starring Role.” CinemaRetro. PRIVATE HREF=“http://cinemaretro. com/index.php?/categories/29-DavidSavage” MACROBUTTON HtmlRes Anchor http://cinemaretro.com/index. php?/categories/29-David-Savage Scott, Andrew Murray. “My Friend Terry Southern.” Andrew Murray Scott Web Site. PRIVATE HREF=“http://www. andrewmurrayscott.com/?q=node/ 27” MACROBUTTON HtmlResAnchor http://www.andrewmurrayscott. com/?q=node/27 Singer, Mark. “Whose Movie Is This? How Much of Easy Rider Belongs to the Novelist Terry Southern?” The New Yorker, June 22 & 29, 1998. Southern, Nile. The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004.

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_____, and Josh Alan Friedman, eds. Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950–1995. New York: Grove Press, 2001. Southern, Terry. Blue Movie. New York: Grove Press, 1996. _____. “Grooving in Chi.” Esquire, November 1968. _____. The Magic Christian. New York: Grove Press, 1996. _____. Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes. New York: Citadel Press, 1990.

_____. “The Rolling Stones’ U.S. Tour: Riding the Lapping Tongue.” Saturday Review, August 12, 1972: 25–30. _____. Texas Summer. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1991. _____, and Mason Hoffenberg. Candy. New York: Grove Press, 1996. Weaver, Neal. “I Have the Blood of Kings in My Veins, Is My Point of View: An Interview with Jack Nicholson.” After Dark, October 1969: 38–42.

Index Berendt, John 101, 103 Bergman, Ingmar 53 Berle, Milton 4, 22 Biskind, Peter 91 Black, Karen 92, 94 Blithe Spirit 198 Block, Ray 195 Blocker, Dan 133 Blondell, Joan 44 Blow Up 51, 55 Blue Movie 21, 135, 136, 162, 165, 166 Bonanza 133 Bonnie and Clyde 164 The Boor 195 Boorman, John 55 Bottoms, Joseph 164 Bowen, David vii, 257 Bowen, Priscilla Graff vii, 134, 135, 257 Bowie, David 167, 168 Brando, Marlon 75, 109, 133, 134 Braunsberg, Andrew 177 The Brave Little Toaster 203 Brecher, Jeremy 239, 240 Bridges, Beau 40, 41 Broccoli, Cubby 51 Bromley, Sheila 15 Brown, Peter 14 Bruce, Honey 23 Bruce, Lenny 22, 23 Brynner, Yul 114 Bumbry, Grace 139 Burgess, Anthony 54 Burnett, David 31 Burroughs 86 Burroughs, William 2, 31, 53, 54, 59, 60, 85, 86, 101, 103, 137, 173–175, 184 Burton, Richard 109, 110 Byrnes, Edd 37–39

Abraham, F. Murray 181, 198 Adler, Ellen 45, 155, 156, 250, 252 Adler, Stella 45, 75, 76 Agnes of God 181 Alexander, John 185 Ali, Muhammad 52 Allen, Jay Presson 82 Allen, Lewis M. 82, 84, 198 Allen, Rusty 19 Allen, Woody 51, 52 The Amistad Revolt: All We Want Is Make Us Free 240 Amram, David vii, 71, 72, 106, 118, 119, 252, 255, 257 Anastasio, Diana 195 Andrews, Julie 166 Ann-Margret 35, 42, 43, 53, 166 Archerd, Army 98 Aria 177, 178 Arkin, Alan 149 Arkoff, Samuel Z. 91 Armstrong, Sam 12, 18, 20, 29, 47, 66, 76, 169 Ashby, Hal 177 At Z. Beach 190, 191 Aulin, Ewa 110 Aumont, Tina 45–47, 64, 66, 242, 243 Avakian, Aram 119–123 Avakian, George 119, 123 Bacon, Kevin 205 Bailey, David 51 Baker, Albie 79, 80 Baker, Joby 19 Baldwin, James 57, 132 Barbarella 53, 54, 58, 63, 70, 89 Bard, Stanley 137, 243 Barris, Chuck 173, 174 Barth, John 119 Barty, Billy 33 Basil, Toni 40, Beach Ball 15, 37–40 Beach Boys 3, 16, 17 Beard, Peter Hill 152 The Beatles 51, 112, 115, 178 Beau Brummels 40 Behind the Green Door 166 Benet, Brenda 32, 33, 35, 37, 38 Ben-Veniste, Richard 149

Calley, John 24, 25, 61, 165, 166 Cameron, Dr. Donald Ewen 8, 9 Cammell, Donald 57 Candy 2, 6, 24–27, 30, 31, 56, 70, 72, 109–111, 113, 126, 149, 157, 162 Canfield, Cass 77 Capote, Truman 84, 152, 153, 175 Capri, Anna 16 Cardinale, Claudia 61, 62 Casino Royale 48, 51–53, 112

261

262

Index

Chakiris, George 88 Chapman, Graham 113 Chapman, Robert S. 96 Chase, Lucia 138 The Cincinnati Kid 34–37, 42–44, 72, 89 Claessen, David 199 Clark, Candy 167 Claxton, William F. 23, 25, 47, 60, 61, 86, 87, 163, 169 Cleese, John 113 A Clockwork Orange 54–57, 148, 154 Clothes for a Summer Hotel 177 Coburn, James 4, 109, 168, 184 Cocksucker Blues 154 Cole, Lewis 225 Comer, Anjanette 4, 22, 23, 25 Conner, Bruce 50 A Cool Million 162–164 Cooper, Henry 52 Cooper, Michael 49–51, 54, 58, 100, 101, 103, 104, 200, 201, 208 Corcoran, Noreen 15, 16 Corman, Gene 14, 15 Corman, Roger 15, 88 Courtenay, Tom 22 The Courtship of Eddie’s Father 168 Cousins, Mark 98 Cousins, Norman 152 Crawford, Johnny 40, 41 Cronenberg, David 236, 238 Crosby, Gary 19 The Cuban Thing 75, 9 Cugat, Xavier 10 La Curée 53, 54, 59 Curran, Pamela 4, 19, 20 Currie, Margie 194 Curtis, Tony 61, 62 Cutler, Jill 239, 240 Daley, Richard 101, 104, 106 Danielian, Leon 138, 140 Darden, Severn 199 Dark Shadows 121, 144 Davis, Sammy, Jr. 81 Dawn of the Kings 179 Deep Throat 166 De Laurentiis, Dino 63, 70 DeLia, Ernie vii, 257 Dern, Bruce 14, 36 The Desperate Hours 86 Deuser, Lou 169 Dillard, Mimi 37 Dillman, Bradford 36 Dixon, Debra 57 Dr. Strangelove 2, 5, 6, 24, 34, 48, 56, 72, 89, 121, 131, 133, 135, 177, 178, 242 Doherty, Charla 40 Dokoudovsky, Vladimir 140 Don’t Make Waves 61, 62 The Doors 186, 187

Doroshow, Jack 81 Dunaway, Faye 164 Easy Rider 56, 57, 88–99, 134, 158, 162, 163, 166, 174 The Ed Sullivan Show 10 Edgington, Lyn 19 Edmonds, Don 37 Edwards, Vince 13 Ejve, Ingmar 165 End of the Road 56, 112, 113, 117–123 Erdman, Richard 12, 14 Fabares, Shelley 19 Faithfull, Marianne 201, 218, 231 Faulkner, William 132, 133 Feldman, Charles 51, 52 Finney, Albert 22 Finnochio, Richard 82–85 Flynt, Althea 186, 187 Flynt, Larry 186, 187 Fonda, Jane 53, 54, 57, 58, 63, 64, 70, 88 Fonda, Peter 26, 60, 88–99 Forgue, Marietta 194 Forman, Milos 137, 209 Franciscus, James 13 Frank, Robert 154 Fraser, Robert 48–52, 60, 65, 77, 78, 108, 116 Frid, Jonathan 121 Friedman, Bruce Jay 79, 189, 190, 227 Friedman, Fredrica S. 220 Friedman, Josh Alan 190, 227, 229, 230 From Hell to Texas 90 Full Moon & High Tide in the Ladies Room 193, 194 Gabor, Eva 126 Garfein Jack 194 Garland, Judy 82 Gelber, Jack 54, 75 Genet, Jean 101–103 Gesell, Erica 205 Get Smart 110 Gibbons, Ayllenne 23, 24 Gibbs, Christopher 60 Gielgud, John 4, 22 Gill, Brendan 134, 186, 196, 213, 218, 219, 238 Gill, Madeline 213 Gill, Rosemary 134 Gilmore, Glen 10, 18 Ginsberg, Allen 101, 103 Giquel, Bernard 82 Girl Happy 3, 19, 20, 30, 32, 33 The Girls on the Beach 14–18, 37, 38 Girodias, Maurice 30, 31 Glaspell, Susan 197 Gleason, Jackie 44 Goldberg, Whoopi 163, 198, 199

Index Golden, Mike 96 Goldstone, James 214 The Gong Show 173 Goodstone, Tony 164 Gordon, Bert I. 40 Gordon, Ruth 87 Göring, Hermann 165 Gorshin, Frank 9 Gould, Elliot 192, 199 The Graduate 110 Green, Henry 2 Green Acres 126 Green Mountain Boys 214 Greenfield, Robert 152 Grossing Out 162, 176, 177 Grossman, Tatyana 144, 145 The Group 52 Grurevich, Boris 69, 151 Gurian, Naomi 169 Haigh, Kenneth 177 Hairspray 200 Hall, Grayson 121 Hancock, John 122 Hardwick, Cheryl 232, 233 Harmon, Joy 40, 41 Harney, John 192 Hartley, Neil 3 Harum Scarum 32–35 Harvey, Laurence 114 Hathaway, Henry 90 Haufrecht, Marcia 193 Hawkins, Jimmy 19 Hay, Alexandra 110 Hayden, Tom 105 Hayward, Brooke 90 Hayward, Leland 90 Head 91 Heat and Sunlight 200 Heatherton, Joey 82, 87 Hefner, Hugh 104 Hellman, Monte 59 Hemmings, David 22, 55 Henry, Buck 110 Hill, Arthur 86 Hoffenberg, Mason 30, 31, 157, 158 Hoffman, Abbie 80, 105, 172 Hogan’s Heroes 165 Hopper, Dennis 48, 89–99, 174, 175, 187, 242 Howard, Ronny 40 Howe, Michael 42 Hunter, Tim 200 The Hunters of Karin Hall 165 Hurd, Gale Anne 200 The Hustler 44 Huston, John 109 I Am Curious Yellow 84 Isherwood, Christopher 6, 25

263

Jackson, Shirley 137 Jagger, Mick 55, 57, 78, 100, 109, 152–154, 165, 175, 232 James, Caryn 200 James, Darius vii, 232, 234, 235, 240, 241, 243, 244, 257 Jamison, Mikki 37–39 Jeffries, Fran 32 Jewison, Norman 36, 37, 42–44 John, Elton 195 Johnson, Lady Bird 81 Jones, Brian 50, 108, 109, 116 Jones, James Earl 121, 122, 123, 134, 198 Jones, Jennifer 26, 28 The Journal of The Loved One 25 Junkie 174 Kaufman, Elaine 71, 182, 245, 246 Kaye, Maury 8, 9 Keach, Stacy 120, 122, 123 Keitel, Harvey 195 Kelly, John vii Kerouac, Jack 151 Keston, Steve 122 Kim, John vii, 211, 212, 257 Kincaid, Aron vii, 16–18, 37, 39 Kirgo, George 61 Kirk, Tommy 40 Klein, Allen 115, 116 Kotcheff, Ted 86, 87, 178 Kovacs, Laszlo 94 Krassner, Paul 81 Krementz, Jill 84, 137 Kristen, Ilene 193–197 Kubrick, Stanley 2, 48, 54–56, 133–136, 154 Kuntstler, William 105, 106, 173 Lad: A Dog 120 Lane, Abbe 10 Lardner, Ring, Jr. 34 The Last Movie 90, 99 The Last Picture Show 164 Laughlin, James 134 Law, John Phillip 63 Leary, Timothy 28, 187 Lee, Ruta 13 Legere, Phoebe 190, 191 Leiber, Jerry 74, 82 Leighton, Margaret 4, 22 Lemnitz, Regina 205 Leno, Jay 96 Lettieri, Al 85 Liberace 22 The Lie of the Mind 195 The Littlest Hobo 29, 30 Litvinoff, Si vii, 54, 55, 67, 72, 79, 81, 82, 84, 148, 149, 166, 167, 177, 178 Logan, Robert 37–39 LoGuidice, Joe vii, 171–173, 190, 191, 256 London, Vicki 40, 41

264

Index

The Long, Hot Summer 47, 48 Lord, Sterling 246 Love, Mike 17 The Loved One 3–6, 20–25, 34, 40, 42, 56, 89, 165, 242 Lucky Days 257 Luigi 156 Luna, BarBara 19, 156 Lynley, Carol 12, 53, 156 Lynn, Bambi 24 Lyon, Nelson 185, 186 MacKendrick, Alexander 61, 62 MacLaine, Shirley 52 The Magic Christian 2, 6, 48, 72, 76, 94, 112– 117, 228, 229 Mahler, Roni 138 Maidstone 106 Mailer, Norman 73, 74, 106, 188 Malden, Karl 35 The Man Who Fell to Earth 166, 167 Mandel, Johnny 14 Mann, Ted 219 Mansfield, Jayne 4, 18 Manuel, Richard 157 Marquand, Christian 45, 46, 64, 109, 111, 242 Marquand, John, Jr. 74, 231, 232 The Marriage Proposal 196 Marshall, Linda 15–17 Matthau, Walter 109 Matthiessen, Peter 73, 107, 255 McBain, Diane 47 McCartney, Paul 154, 201 McGrath, Camilla 67, 68, 232, 233, 235 McGrath, Earl vii, 67, 68, 215, 232, 233, 235 McGrath, Joe 51, 112–115, 117 McGuire, Dennis 120 McLuhan, Marshall 9 McQueen, Steve 35, 36, 42–44 Meader, Vaughn 22 Meeske, Marilyn 74, 83 Meggs, Brown 177, 178 Meister, Kati vii, 257 Menes, Rosemary 138 Merlin 165 Merrill, Sam 157, 158 Midnight Cowboy 168 Milch, David 220 Miller, Arthur 157 Miller, Henry 5, 20, 21 Mills, Hayley 110 Mimiuex, Yvette 53, 86 Miss Harlow see Finnochio, Richard Mr. Novak 13 Mitchel, Mary 16 Mitford, Jessica 240, 242 Mobley, Mary Ann 32, 33 Moffitt, Peggy 47, 60, 61, 66 Monck, Chip vii, 164, 165 The Monkees 91

Monty Python’s Flying Circus 113 Moreau, Jeanne 136 Morell, Ann 36 Morley, Robert 4, 113 Morrison, Jim 186 Morse, Robert 4, 22, 25, 156 Mostel, Zero 22, 76 Murphy, Eddie 185 Music ’60 Presents the Hit Parade 9 My Three Sons 13 Naked Lunch 173, 174 Nelson, Gene 33 Newman, Paul 44 Nichols, Mike 166 Nicholson, Jack 26, 59, 90, 93–95, 98 Nicholson, James 91 Night of the Iguana 121 Nilsson, Harry 168, 170, 171, 189, 191–194, 197, 198, 207, 208, 223 Nilsson, Rob 200 Nilsson, Una O’Keefe 170, 192 Niven, David 51 Noel, Chris 19, 37–39 North, Jay 14 NYPD Blue 219, 220 Obits 197 O’Dell, Denis 112 O’Donoghue, Michael 183–185, 232, 233 Of Mice and Men 87 O’Hara, Quinn 13 Oklahoma! 24 Oldenberg, Klaus 144 On the Loose see Woody One-Eyed Jacks 133 Oppenheim, David 155, 156 Owens, Iris 31, 83, 184 Page, Geraldine 36, 76, 78, 107, 141, 142, 177, 180, 181, 195, 198 Paley, Maggie 83 Pallenberg, Anita 50, 57, 58, 109, 201, 216 The Panic in Needle Park 164 Papp, Joseph 118 Parks, Kay 163 Parks, Michael 26, 85, 163, 168, 169 Parsons, Gram 100 Passer, Ivan 137 Pasternak, Joe 19, 20 Patton, Bart 37 Peckinpah, Sam 34–37 Peeping Tom 53 Pennebaker, D.A. 190 Pereyslavec, Valentina 138 Performance 57, 154 Perry, Frank 24, 25, 30, 31 Perry Mason 14, 97 Pettet, Joanna 51, 52 Pickens, Slim 133, 134

Index Playboy 11 Plimpton, George 73, 74, 82, 83, 99, 117, 118, 139, 217, 236, 238 Plummer, Amanda 195 Polanski, Roman 61, 84 Powell, Michael 53 Preminger, Otto 110 Presley, Elvis 3, 19, 30, 32–35 Pressman, Edward R. 200 Puzzle of a Downfall Child 164 The Queen 82–84, 149 Raab, Mary 58, 59 Raab, Max 55, 56, 58, 59, 119, 120, 122, 149 Radziwill, Lee 152 Rafelson, Bob 91, 93 Raft, George 82 Rainer, Luise 12, 169 Ramos, Raul vii Random, Bob 40 Ransohoff, Martin 6, 21, 34, 36, 61, 136 Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tales 80, 208 Redford, Robert 200, 202–204 Redgrave, Vanessa 3, 4, 6 Rees, Jerry 203, 204 Reilly, Peter 157 Richards, Keith 78, 100, 109, 152–154, 173, 201 Richardson, Perry 200, 201, 208, 231, 235, 238, 244–246 Richardson, Tony 3, 4, 6, 20–22, 24, 25, 187, 242 Richlin, Maurice 61 Ride in the Whirlwind 59 Rivers, Gwynne 66 Rivers, Larry 66, 67, 77, 79, 82–84, 124, 137– 139, 141, 144–146, 156, 190, 191, 208, 209, 216, 232, 248, 255 Robbins, Jerome 122 Robinson, Edward G. 35, 43 Roeg, Nicholas 55, 167 Rogers, Steve 16 The Rolling Stones 50, 51, 60, 100, 108, 152– 154, 164, 201 Rooney, Tim 40 Roraback, Catherine 150, 157 Rubell, Steve 175 Rubin, Jerry 105 Ryan’s Hope 193, 197 Sagal, Boris 19, 20 Said, Edward 215 St. Just, Maria 177 Saturday Night Live 183–186, 189 Saunders, Lori 16 Savage, David 98 Schatzberg, Jerry 163, 164 Schneider, Burt 91, 93, 98 Schuster, Frank 184

265

Schuster, Rosie 184, 185 Scott, Andrew Murray vii, 182, 183 Seale, Bobby 105 Seaver, Richard 54, 101, 103, 208 Sebring, Jay 126 Segal, George 86, 87, 169, 170, 177–179, 181– 183, 192, 211, 231 Segal, Linda Rogoff 179, 181–183, 211 Segal, Marion Sobel 87, 169, 170, 178, 179, 183 Sellers, Peter 48, 51–53, 112–117, 133, 176, 177 The Seventh Seal 53 Shepard, Sam 195 Silverman, Fred 185 Simon, Frank 82, 84 Sims, Cindy 193, 207, 208 Sinatra, Frank 22 Smith and Dale 9, 10 Soderbergh, Steven 256 Solters, Lee 84 Southern, Nile 28, 56, 57, 68–70, 77, 79, 93, 100, 107, 116, 117, 142–144, 149, 151, 158, 159, 166, 167, 190, 191. 199, 200, 213, 214, 220–222, 235, 246, 250, 252, 254, 255 Spector, Phil 94 Stamp, Terence 22 Stander, Lionel 4, 22 Starr, Ringo 108–110, 112, 115, 116, 166, 184 Steiger, Rod 4, 22–24, 53 Stein, Jean 132, 174, 214–216, 232, 235, 240, 242 Sterling, Tisha 40, 41 Stern, Jacques 174 Stockwell, Dean 36 Stout, Ruth 129 The Strange One 194 Strasberg, John 181 Strasberg, Lee 76, 181 Streep, Meryl 205 Styron, William 157 Sullivan, Ed 10, 11 Susie, Lolly 194 Susskind, David 86 Swoboda, Maria 138 Taft, Gene 168, 169 Tate, Sharon 61, 62, 83, 110, 126 Taurog, Norman 19 Taylor, Wilda 32, 33, 35 The Teenager 9 The Telephone 163, 197–200, 205, 206 Texas Across the River 45, 242 Texas Summer 208 Thaggart, Betsy 228 Then Came Bronson 163 Thinnes, Roy 47, 48 Three Dog Night 168 Tiffin, Pamela 22 To Catch a Thief 79 The Tonight Show 96

266

Index

Torn, Angelica Page vii, 36, 76, 141, 142, 177, 235–237, 244–246, 257 Torn, Danae 199 Torn, John 76, 141, 177 Torn, Rip vii, 35, 36, 76, 78, 90–93, 96–98, 106, 107, 129, 131, 141, 149, 166–168, 177, 180, 183, 188, 191, 195, 196, 198, 199, 235– 237, 242, 248, 250, 255–257 Torn, Tony 76, 141, 177, 257 Tough City 162, 171, 172 Trifles 197 Tristan, Dorothy 120–123 Trocchi, Alexander 182, 183 Turner, Tina 47 Tynan, Ken 58, 59 Under the Yum Yum Tree 12–14, 19, 34 Unger, Anthony 112 Vadim, Roger 45, 53, 54, 57, 58, 63, 64, 70 Vidal, Gore 215 Village of the Giants 40–42 Vines, Jimmy 246 Viva Las Vegas 19 Vonnegut, Kurt 255 Wagon Train 14 Walker, Ellie 26, 64, 66 Walker, Robert, Jr. 26, 27, 88, 94 Warhol, Andy 49, 82, 152, 175, 184 Waters, John 200 Watts, Charlie 108 Waugh, Evelyn 3, 6, 242 The Wayne and Schuster Show 184 Wedgeworth, Ann 195 Weinrib, Lennie 37 Weinstein, Arnold 66, 67, 71, 208

Welch, Raquel 114, 166 Weld, Tuesday 3, 37, 42–44, 53, 110 Welles, Orson 51, 52 Wellman, William, Jr. 93 West, Martin 16, 17 West, Nathanael 163, 164 West, Red 34 Where’s Poppa? 87 Wiesel, Torsten 216, 232, 235 Wigan, Gareth 48 The Wild Angels 88 Williams, Robin 198 Williams, Tennessee 177 Williamson, Nicol 87 Willis, Gordon 120 Wilson, Brian 17 Wilson, Carl 17 Wilson, Dennis 17 Winters, David 32 Winters, Jonathan 4, 22 Witney, William 16 Witt, Peter 166 Wood, Lana 15, 16 Woody 169 Wright, Amy vii, 180, 183, 197, 199, 204, 248, 250, 257 Wright, Teresa 86 Yulin, Harris 123 Zakka, Richard 179 Zappa, Frank 173 Zarzecki, Luke vii, 257 Ziegler, Alan 225 Zorich, George 67 Zylberberg, Regine 57, 58 ZZ Top 218