photo ©1982 William Claxton
He'd be a natural for one of those American Express commercials. His looks may be a secret, but not the fact that he's one of the world's coolest living writers. In 1964 the publication of Candy turned Terry Southern into a literary celeb. His new rep sent readers back to his earlier novels, Flash and Filigree and The Magic Christian. The former was subtler than Candy, and the latter was arguably funnier. He next conquered the screenplay when he teamed up with Stanley Kubrick to write Dr. Strangelove; soon audiences were in the aisles over "pre-verts" and 11 precious bodily fluids." His work on subsequent films was always easy to spot, but nothing topped Strangelove until Easy Rider, the Sixties' countercultural blah-blah-blah.
In the meantime, a brilliant collection of short pieces had come out, Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes, itself followed by the novel Blue Movie (1970), which chronicled the goings-on of a movie crew attempting to make the ultimate big-budget skinflick.
Southern still remains friends with such iconoclasts as William Burroughs, whose Naked Lunch he was instrumental in getting published, and Dennis Hopper, who originally wanted the opening scene of Easy Rider to be shown upside down! Other buddies: actors Michael Parks and fellow Texan Rip Torn, with whom he hunts and fishes near his Connecticut home.
Southern's next novel, Youngblood, should be out soon.
The following talk took place in TS's office at NBC in New York, where he's currently writing for Saturday Night Live. On one wall was a framed poster of a forgotten film which bore the legend "WOMEN COULD FEEL HIM ACROSS A ROOM!" In the background Randy Newman sang slyly of rednecks, teenage girls, and Huey Long ... R.B.
CATALOG: Where were you born? TERRY: Alvarado, Texas.
C: Your early stories that were set in Texas are a little like Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. Were they an influence?
T: No, those stories were based on stuff that happened- growing up there in rural Texas. They're part of a longer work, the novel called Youngblood.
C: Do you carry an identity as a Texan?
T: Well,...yes, I guess I took the whole "Texas Uber Alles" thing for granted, right up through about the junior year in high school, when I hitch-hiked out to L.A. and then over to Chicago and I began to see things besides sagebrush. C: What writers influenced you when you were young?
T: I liked Edgar Allan Poe and Weird Tales-H. P. Lovecraft ... things in the weird vein. Nathanael West. The English writer Henry Green-very intricate style, and funny. Probably the way Evelyn Waugh would have written if he'd had more patience for rewriting.
C: Did you ever read Huysmans, the French nineteenth-century guy?
T: Against the Grain and La Bas, Down There. He was one of the first "surrealist" writers of interest to me. I recall a great scene in one of his books where he's making it with this lady ventriloquist who's required to project her voice outside the door of the room, pretending to be her angry husband. You know, "Hey! What the devil's going on in there!" He's highly contemporary and I've often thought it would be a very worthwhile project to update the translation of writers like that. Lautremont and Canetti might be others.
C: How'd you manage to go from those Texas life stories to the wild satiric use of language and obscene farcical situations?
T: Well, Poe wrote this sea adventure, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," where a ship's rudder and masts are lost in a storm and it just drifts. The crew freaks into extreme weirdness. In one section the hero, forced into cannibalism by hunger, is eating a human liver, and a seagull swoops down, snatches it away, then drops it on the deck with a hideous SPLAT! The hero scrambles over, grabs it again, then gets into a terrible fight for it with one of the other survivors.
Well, the whole thing was so outlandish that I wanted to turn to my best friend-Big Herb-on to it. He said, "Gawd-damn, you mus' be crazy!" He couldn't even read it. But it was the style that put him off, so I decided to rewrite it, using classmates and teachers of ours in this very strange story. I did it in more of a Zane Grey style. Then he dug it.
It was my mother who had first read me a Poe story-"The Gold Bug" or something equally innocuous-so I thought about asking her to read mine. But now, in the Big Herb version, I figured it was too much.
C: Was black culture an influence on your sense of humor?
T: Oh yeah. I think most people from the South pick it up. The influence is extraordinary- sense of humor, taste in food, music, dope, everything ... even speech. The whole "Southern accent" is an obvious derivation from black speech patterns.
C: In one of your early stories you put in a reference to "Bullmoose" Jackson's R& B record "Big Ten Inch Record."
T: Yeah. "My gal don't go for smokin'/ Liquor just makes her flinch/Seems she don't go for nothin'/'Ceptin' my big ten inch!" (laughs). That was another nice thing about Texas: There was this whole body of music that existed called "race records," that were put out only for blacks. They weren't even distributed in music stores. You used to be able to go into "Niggertown," across what they called "the Central tracks," where they had all this great barbeque and ribs and the music, too. And it was surprisingly cool to go there. It wasn't antisocial then. I guess they needed the money. And I think they liked the idea that we dug the music and the food. It was really hot stuff, too-drenched in red pepper. Lots of people went to these places just to pick up barbeque. I went for the music, and there was always some interesting action . . . razor fights. When Elvis came out with that black pronunciation, a lot of those records became more acceptable to whites.
C: You liked Elvis.
T: Yeah. Elvis was somethin' else. He styled himself on Ray Charles. He did a version of "I Got a Woman (Way'Cross Town)" that was even more jumpin' than Ray's. He made black music mainstream. I met Elvis once, when he was doing Harum Scarum and I was working on Cincinnati Kid. I went over to his set to visit this girl, and he had his whole high school football team throwing the ball around between takes. They'd hit on all the girls in the film. So Elvis saw me with this girl and asked, "Who is that? Is he some damn Yankee?"
And they said, "Naw, he's a Texas boy. A writer, Terry Southern." So it turned out that one of Elvis's guys came over, very formal, and said, "Mr. Southern, my name is Red West, and Elvis would like to meet you." So Elvis came up, said, "Mighty glad to meet you. Don't you know that your movie Dr. Strangelove is a great favorite? We've seen it about-what, Red?-thirteen times!" Well, I was surprised, and I said that I was surprised it had even played that long in Memphis. He said, "No, no. At the house. We run it up at the house!" So he had this sense of humor, and he especially liked Slim Pickens' role.
C: How was Slim Pickens on Strangelove?
T: He was a joy to work with. You know, the financing for Dr. Strangelove came about because Peter Sellers was to play all these different roles, including the bomber pilot (Pickens' part). But, when it came time to shoot it, Sellers had sprained his ankle-out carousing, if memory serves-and had to be replaced for the pilot role because it meant moving around a lot. So Stanley said that you couldn't replace Sellers with an actor. You had to get someone authentic. The ideal choice, of course, was John Wayne, but I guess he thought it was part of a mad commie plot. So I suggested Dan Blocker from Bonanza, but his agent said it was definitely "pinko." So then Stanley said, "Get this guy Slim Pickens. He was great in One Eyed Jacks." Well, Slim had never been out of the Southwest, except to do stunt work between rodeos, so he came over on the plane with his boots and cowboy hat, and when he arrived Stanley told me to talk to him, since I was from Texas. So I went down to the stage where Slim was standing with this la-de-dah production assistant, very Oxonian. I introduced myself, got us both three fingers of Wild Turkey in some water glasses, asked the assistant if he wanted any. "Bit early for me, heh heh!" So then Slim and I talked. And it later fell to me to introduce him to James Earl Jones when he arrived on the set. James Earl is always very dignified, very Shakespearean, and I had no idea how to find a common ground between them. Then it came to me how Slim had just been working in One Eyed Jacks with Marion Brando, so I mentioned that and James Earl was impressed. "Brando's Mark Antony was superlative," he said. "it must be very satisfying to work with him." "Wal," said Slim, "ah worked with Bud Brando for ten months an' durin' that time ah never seen him do one single thing that wudn't all man an' all white," saying this, of course, without even thinking what he was saying, and just kept on talking. James Earl never cracked.
C: I heard a story about how you were to be guest of honor at a party given by film critic Arthur Knight. You pulled up in a limo at four in the morning, when everybody remaining was barely conscious. There was a starlet making scrambled eggs, and you took a plate and started some endless spiel as you pushed the eggs onto the floor and ground them into the carpet in a kind of mosaic. Then you thanked everybody and split
T: Apocryphal. Never happened. And I never even heard of such an incident. You've mixed me up with Mailer or Vidal. Hmmm. Actually, though, a few times people have told me things like "There's this guy on Block Island, or Provincetown, or somewhere, pretending to be you." Running up tabs at bars and restaurants, renting limos, getting laid-all fabulous starlet and socialite poon, no doubt. Ha.
C: There's a story about you and Dino De Laurentiis. He hired you to do some dumbbell musical version of Roman Holiday, and you farmed it out to a friend. You helped him only to the point of sending him your suggestion for the film's opening: a chorus of organ grinders singing "It's a Roman, Roman Holiday!" while their monkeys whack off into their cups.
T: Weil, yes, but I think it may have been a bit more imaginative than that. But anyway, that was during the time I was working on Barbarella, which he produced, and he kept bugging me about doing this dopey musical, So, just to cool him out, I said, "Oh sure," then I told the agent to price me out of it-you know, ask so much money that he'd just drop it. And so he did, but Dino D. went for it. The agent got all excited and said we had a great deal, but I couldn't see what would be great about a musical version of Roman Holiday, so I gave it to this friend of mine, Fred Segal, who needed the money and who was very talented. I mean, even though he'd never worked on a film script, I knew he could do it.
C: Didn't you once work on a script for William Burroughs' novel, Junkie?
T: Yes, I collaborated with Bill Burroughs on it. Dennis Hopper was to direct and play the lead, Bill Lee. For the first few days everything seemed to be going well. We had a big suite at the Grammercy Park Hotel, all paid for by the film's producer, the legendary Jacques 'Count Rothchild' Stern, who zoomed about in this motorized wheelchair. Then suddenly, Dennis said, "Jesus Christ, I thought we were making Naked Lunch! I've never read Junkie!" So he reads it, gets very excited, shouts something about "An actor prepares! An actor prepares!" And he rushes out into the night to experience the junk-life for a week or so. Anyway, he sort of disappears, and we have to go looking for him in these shooting galleries. It was a mess ... but it'll still make a great movie one day.
C: Are you working on a new book?
T: Yes, it's a novel called Youngblood. I mentioned it earlier. Putnam's should be publishing it next year, in the spring.
C: What's it about?
T: It's like those early stories of mine. Set in Texas ... Say, I'm getting a little, uh, dehydrated. Why don't we ...
C: Get a drink? T: Sure . . . something like that.