A reader recently wrote to say she enjoyed hearing about my beginnings as a writer. This got me musing, and as I mused I remembered that most people, including people in their seventies as I am, are unaware that before television took over the world in the 1950s, there were several hundred mainstream magazines and thousands of newspapers in America publishing short stories and poetry. Thousands!
Which is to say, before televisions were installed in every home, there was an enormous demand for short stories in our culture, with high-end magazines such as Collier’s Weekly and Harper’s Magazine paying very good money for short stories, with many movies made in those days based on short stories.
For instance, Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life is based on a
story first published as a pamphlet in the 1940s by Philip Van Doren Stern and
subsequently published in Reader’s Scope
and Good Housekeeping before Capra
bought the movie rights for 50,000 dollars. Yes, Good Housekeeping published short stories!
Then television conquered American society and culture, and within a decade the golden era of short stories was over. The time people used to spend reading short stories was now given to watching the tube. By the early 1970s, when I was in my twenties, there were only a few dozen magazines left that paid well for stories, mostly Men’s and Women’s magazines, and nearly all the stories they published were by established writers.
Nevertheless, in those days before
the internet, before there were affordable ways to self-publish and distribute stories
and books, thousands of aspiring writers bought The Writer’s Market every year, a volume listing all the magazines supposedly
open to considering unsolicited (non-agented) stories and articles. This mighty
tome, updated annually, was something of a fraud since most of the magazines listed
therein would only consider stories sent to them by established literary agents,
though many of the listings said otherwise.
I sent my stories to magazines large and small, collected rejection letters galore, and then in 1972, through a series of seeming coincidences and lucky breaks, a New York literary agent asked if she might represent me. Her name was Dorothy Pittman and she was among the very last literary agents in America who would gladly submit short stories to magazines for her known and unknown clients.
Even more remarkably, she was
eager to represent what is now known as Literary Fiction, which has come to
mean non-genre fiction. Sci-fi, Mystery, Young Adult, Fantasy, and Historical
Romance are some of the most popular genres. By the 1970s non-genre fiction was
becoming less and less saleable, and today Literary Fiction is a genre most
publishers shudder to consider.
All the editors to whom Dorothy submitted my stories and books were middle-aged, extremely well read, and interested in unique writers, not copycats. None of them lasted long in the biz after the giant multi-national corporations completed their takeover of the publishing industry by the early 1980s.
In her first two years as my agent, Dorothy marketed my novella that had drawn her to represent me, two of my novels, and dozens of my short stories. She got several nibbles, but no takers.
One day Dorothy called the
commune where I was living in Santa Cruz and said in her charming Georgia
drawl, “Dahlin’, I’m getting so frustrated not selling anything of yours. I’ve
got several editors who love your writing, but you’re not famous and your
stories are a bit edgy, if you know what I mean.” She paused. “Have you sent me
everything you’ve written?”
“Except for my stories in a
folder labeled No Way,” I said
despondently. “Otherwise, yes.”
“Send me those,” she said, and I did.
Fast-forward a year. By then I’d
left Santa Cruz for Menlo Park where I worked as a janitor and teacher’s aide
in a Day Care Center before moving to Eugene, Oregon where I was living in a
converted garage with my girlfriend and desperately looking for a job. Out of
the blue, Dorothy called from New York to say Cosmopolitan Magazine wanted to buy my short story Willow for a thousand dollars. Dorothy
would take her 10% commission and I would get nine hundred dollars upon
publication. For someone who just quit his job cleaning kiddy toilets for
three-bucks-an-hour this was a mind-boggling sum.
I frowned. “Willow? The story about the black woman
boxer who through a series of implausible flukes gets a chance to box against professional
male boxers? Cosmopolitan? Really?”
A month later, down to my last few dollars, a check for nine hundred dollars came in the mail. My monthly nut was fifty dollars. I was rich! Over the next year I completed two novels, one of which was Inside Moves, my first published novel.
However, three years would pass before that miracle occurred. In the meantime, I worked as a landscaper in Medford, Oregon and did very little writing. Then Dorothy sold a story of mine entitled The Swami and the Surfer to Seventeen for five hundred dollars, and Seventeen commissioned me to write a Christmas story for seven hundred dollars.
While I worked on the Christmas story, I continued to labor as landscaper until I saved enough money to travel to New York to meet Dorothy in-person for the first time and meet the magazine editors who had taken a chance on my edgy stories.
I spent four months on the East Coast, thought about relocating there, ran out of money, returned to Oregon, and then moved to Seattle where I fell on very hard times until Doubleday bought Inside Moves for a pittance and Dorothy sold a few more stories for me. Then right before Inside Moves was to be published, New American Library acquired the paperback rights for a large sum, the movie deal was made, and I was lifted out of poverty for several years.
At the publication party for Inside Moves in New York, the editors from Cosmopolitan, Gallery, Seventeen, and Young Miss who had bought my stories were there to celebrate with me, as were editors from Redbook, Penthouse, and Esquire who had never bought a story from me. They came to let me to know they loved my stories and would have published them had I been better known.
Virtually every successful writer in America and England for the hundred years prior to 1970 published short stories in magazines en route to publishing a novel. In those bygone days, writing short stories was the training ground for becoming a professional writer. Striving to publish short stories was the gauntlet writers had to run if they wanted to one day enter the Promised Land of being a published author.
In 1980 I was on a radio show
in Sacramento talking about the movie based on Inside Moves that was about to be released. The interviewer asked
me how I got started as a writer and I mentioned publishing my first story in Cosmopolitan.
I think I must have sounded slightly
embarrassed about my first commercial success coming via a Women’s magazine and
not Esquire or The New Yorker, because a few minutes later an elderly woman called
into the show and said, “I want you to know, Mr. Walton, you are in fine
company having your first story published in Cosmopolitan.” Then she paused for effect. “For Ernest Hemmingway
published his first short story in Cosmopolitan, too.”
I have never confirmed this,
preferring to believe the delightful caller knew what she was talking about.
Rico with his daughters Rachel and Sarah circa 1990 photo courtesy of Steve Rees
This is the fourth and final article in a series
commemorating my friend Rico Rees, AKA Richard Rees.
∆
February 1967. Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Redwood
City, California.
When Rico had two years and five months of high
school left to endure, and I only had five more months of high school to get
through, Rico bought a used mimeograph machine and he and I and Dave Biasotti launched
Lyceum, a magazine. We brought out a
new issue every few weeks chock full of articles and poems and stories. Dave
made great pen and ink drawings for the first few covers, after which we used
photos taken by Rico’s brother Steve for the covers. These photo covers were
some of the very earliest Xerox copies.
We printed a hundred copies of the first issue and
were thrilled when fifty people ponied up four dollars to have the next six
issues mailed to them. Rico then convinced Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, the
hippest bookstore in our world at the time, to sell Lyceum for 25 cents a copy, and Rico and I hawked the rest of the
copies at school.
A heady experience of my young life was seeing
several of my peers sitting around at lunchtime at Woodside High reading Lyceum. Along with drawing the covers,
Dave drew a one-frame cartoon for each issue and wrote reviews of new folk rock
and rock albums. Rico and I wrote articles and stories and poems, and by the
third issue people were submitting poems and notices of things for sale, some
of which we published.
Were we good writers? Hard to say. Were we
enthusiastic? Very.
∆
That spring Rico fell in love with a young woman
named Maureen. She was beautiful and smart and sexy and funny, and she enjoyed
Rico’s company but drove him crazy because she denied him the sensual romantic
connection he longed for.
Also around this time, Rico shared with me that
his doctors were not optimistic he would survive much beyond his twenties. He
told me this in the context of a conversation in which I said something about
us getting a place together, going to Europe, and living our lives as literary
bohemians.
“I don’t know, Murray,” he said, sounding
uncharacteristically pessimistic. “Lately I’ve been having this fantasy of blasting
off in a rocket ship and just going.”
(Fortunately, advances in medical technology made
it possible for Rico to live to sixty-eight.)
∆
One afternoon I was at Rico’s and he asked me to
play some jazz piano so he could jam with me on a saxophone he’d just gotten.
He hadn’t taken lessons, but he loved jazz and wanted to make music. So I sat
down at their wonderful Steinway and played a jazzy-sounding chord or two, and
Rico blew slow long notes with great feeling. We were both thrilled by the sounds
we made together, and Rico said he might take lessons, but as far as I know he
never did and we never played music together again.
∆
We brought out the last issue of Lyceum at the end of May, right before
school ended, and Rico announced we’d made a profit of seventy dollars, which
in 1967 was a pile of cash for the likes of us. Rico proposed we use the money
to take some girls to San Francisco for walking around and supper.
I took my girlfriend Connie, Rico brought Maureen,
and I can’t remember who Dave brought, possibly Connie’s friend Harriet. For
some reason, Connie decided the gals would wear saris and she came up with
three beautiful saris for them. We took the train from Atherton to San
Francisco and caught a bus to North Beach where we hung out at City Lights
Books, had coffee and biscotti at Caffe Trieste, went shopping in Chinatown, ate
supper at The Spaghetti Factory, and came home on a late night train—everything
paid for with money made from our magazine.
With the last of the Lyceum money, Rico got two tickets for Ray Charles at Frost
Amphitheatre at Stanford, our last hurrah together before I headed off to
college at brand new UC Santa Cruz and Rico stayed on at Woodside High.
∆
I dropped out of college after two years, which coincided with Rico finishing high school. He decided to take what they now call a gap year before attending Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio. During that interim year, Rico rented a room in a house in Palo Alto for some months before he moved into a hippy commune in Palo Alto with Jean Trounstine who would become his first wife.
Jean was a bright energetic Jewish gal from
Cincinnati, five years older than Rico. She had a BA in Drama from Beloit and
had come to California to join the cultural ferment going on in the Bay Area. I
first met Jean when Rico took me to House of Pies on University Avenue where
Jean was a waitress. The waitresses there wore uniforms composed of skirt,
blouse, and cap that supposedly made them resemble, symbolically, a piece of
pie.
We had a hilarious time as Jean enacted the
required shtick of House of Pie waitresses when Rico, following the printed
prompt on the table, asked in the manner of Humphrey Bogart, “What’s fresh
today? Besides you sweetie pie?”
Jean batted her eyelashes and said, “Hold on a sec,
big fella. I’ll go ask our baker.” And then she sashayed away to the kitchen,
mimed asking the baker, and sashayed back to us. “You’re not gonna believe
this, but all the pies are fresh
today. And you know what just came
out of the oven?”
“The apple pie?” I guessed, the place redolent
with the scent of apple pie.
“What are you psychic?” said Jean, gaping at me. “The apple did just come out of the oven. And the blueberry and the cherry and the lemon meringue.”
I loved Jean. She and Rico were a great match and they
were devoted to each other for several years until their lives diverged when
Rico was in his late twenties.
∆
Around the time he was beginning his relationship
with Jean, Rico heard a talk by Husain Chung, a radical practitioner of Psychodrama
as it pertains to psychotherapy, and shortly thereafter Rico began attending
group Psychodrama sessions at a house in Palo Alto, the groups led by Vik
Lovell and his Psychodrama trainees. Interesting side note: Ken Kesey, who
lived in the area, dedicated his book One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Vik Lovell.
Rico was fascinated by the evolving use of Psychodrama
in psychotherapy, and these Vik Lovell sessions were of particular interest to
him because Lovell was, according to Rico, “constantly experimenting and
unafraid to seriously fuck up.” Rico asked me to attend one of the Lovell
sessions with him and I did.
Before being admitted into the house where the
sessions took place, participants agreed not to leave until the three-hour session
was over. Rico had told me a little bit about what went on at the Lovell
sessions, but I was wholly unprepared for what I was to endure for the next
three hours.
Vik Lovell was a handsome man in his thirties with
an assured air. I am tempted to use the descriptors arrogant, insensitive, misogynist, and narcissist to describe him, but maybe he was just having a bad day.
His trainees were men and women who dressed alike in loose-fitting pants and
black T-shirts to identify them as Vik’s assistants.
Vik sat on a high stool just outside the large
circle of attendees arrayed in chairs around the empty center of the big living
room that served as the stage for the evening’s psychodramas. Vik communicated
with his trainees by gesturing and pointing, and he directed his DJ with quiet
asides to play certain cuts from a handy library of LPs—what Rico and I would
later refer to as psychodrama soundtracks.
After reiterating we were not to leave before the
session was over, Vik invited a tall bearded American man to stand in the
center of the circle and tell us what was on his mind. With little preface, the
man said he’d had sex with the wife of a friend, after which the wife and
friend broke off relations with him. To my surprise, the two people he was
talking about were there, and Vik directed the man and woman to join the
bearded man in the center of the room.
The couple was British, the woman strikingly
beautiful, the man handsome with a muscular build. The woman acknowledged she
had slept with the bearded guy, said she regretted doing so, and was grateful to
her husband for forgiving her and being so understanding. Both husband and wife
said they had no interest in rehashing the affair or having anything more to do
with the bearded guy.
The British guy struck me as intelligent and
reasonable, the British gal the same, while the bearded American seemed
seriously disturbed and obviously distraught about being booted out of his
relationship with the couple.
Vik gestured to his trainees. One of the female
trainees stood behind the British woman, one of the male trainees stood behind
the bearded American, and another male trainee stood behind the British fellow.
And then all hell broke loose. The woman trainee
accused the British guy of neglecting her sexually and shouted, “Which is the
only reason I slept with that disgusting pig!” The trainee standing behind the
British guy shouted at the British gal, “Bullshit! You slept with him because
you’re a whore!”
The British guy protested, “No, I don’t think
you’re a whore.”
And Vik asked, “Then what do you think she is?”
And before the British guy could reply, the
bearded guy said to the British guy, “She told me you were impotent with women
but got turned on by young men.”
“I never said that,” cried the British gal. “My
husband is a wonderful lover.”
I don’t remember the order of events after that,
but following a few more inflammatory exchanges spoken by the psychodrama
trainees, the British guy and the bearded guy started seriously brawling, the
bearded guy throwing punches, the British guy trying to wrestle the bearded guy
to the ground, and the British gal trying to intervene only to be restrained by
two of the trainees who continued to call her whore and slut.
Then an elderly man in the audience of attendees
shouted, “This is wrong, Vik. You need to stop this!”
And in the next moment the bearded guy broke away
from the British guy, pulled the elderly man out of his seat, threw him to the
ground and started pummeling him, which caused me to jump up and try to stop
the bearded guy from seriously injuring the elderly guy. But before I could pull
the bearded guy off the old man, two of Vik’s male trainees grabbed me and slammed
me against a wall and one of them pressed his fist hard against my nose and
shouted, “What’s your deal, asshole? Working on your hero complex?”
My nose started gushing blood and Vik signaled his
trainees to let up on me, which they did, and then and one of them took me by
the arm and led me to a bathroom where I stemmed the flow of blood with a plug
of toilet paper and stayed in the bathroom until the bleeding stopped.
The trainee walked me back to my chair and said,
“Don’t get up again unless Vik tells you to.” By then the chaos had subsided
and Strawberry Fields was playing on
the stereo. The British guy and gal were sitting apart from each other, both of
them weeping, and the bearded guy was lying face down, sobbing, and I don’t
know where the elderly guy was. I desperately wanted to leave but was afraid if
I tried to go the trainees would hurt me again, so I closed my eyes and waited
for the hours to pass.
Rico was very upset afterwards and apologized for
not warning me that I was never to intervene in an ongoing psychodrama unless Vik
invited me to participate. I suffered for some weeks with bruised ribs and did
not attend any more Vik Lovell psychodrama evenings. Rico, however, went
several more times and reported learning many valuable lessons from observing
what went on in those sessions.
Later in his career as a psychologist, Rico would
employ less violent psycho-dramatic techniques, especially when working with
children and teenagers. When we were in our thirties, Rico and I collaborated
on a screenplay called Any Time You’re
Ready about a woman psychiatrist who runs a home for emotionally disturbed
teens and employs Psychodrama as part of her work with the kids. We were never
able to sell the script, though we were certain it was the best movie ever
written.
∆
Rico on the James River photo courtesy of Steve Rees
In 1970, when I was twenty-one and Rico was nineteen, Rico and Jean moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio. I’d only spent a little time with Jean before they moved to Yellow Springs, but I got to know her very well when Ilived in Yellow Springs for two months in early 1971.
While Rico was attending Antioch, Jean taught
Drama at Central State University, a predominantly African American college,
and she taught theatre games to little kids and adults on weekends. While I was
in Yellow Springs, I assisted Jean with her little kid classes, took her
classes for adults, and Rico got me a job editing a student handbook for
Antioch. I’m not sure how he convinced my boss at Antioch to hire me as an
editor, but he did.
I rented a room above Deaton’s Hardware, ate most
of my suppers with Rico and Jean at their cute little house on the edge of the
campus, and unsuccessfully romanced their good friend Kay who enjoyed me but
didn’t consider me boyfriend material.
Jean was a gourmet cook and a frequent dieter. An
ongoing source of amusement for me was that Jean would serve Rico and me
wonderful multi-course meals while resigning herself to eating a hardboiled egg
and a chicken thigh. Yet nine times out of ten, I wanted that egg and chicken
thigh more than I wanted the fancy meal. Go figure.
What was I doing in Yellow Springs, Ohio, you ask,
besides living near Rico and Jean? Well, I was waiting to hear from a major publisher
in New York to whom I had sent my first novel. In my extreme naiveté, having
recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, I was sure I could write a novel as good
or better than Vonnegut’s, and while living in a hovel in Ashland, Oregon, I wrote
my first novel, The Apprenticeship of
Abraham Steinberg, and sent it to Vonnegut’s publisher, having gotten their
address from the copyright page of Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle.
On my way to New York to find out what was holding
up my rise to lasting international fame, I stopped in Yellow Springs, Ohio and
sent the publisher my updated contact numbers (Rico’s phone and address) and
waited to hear from them, not knowing they didn’t read unsolicited manuscripts
by neophyte writers unrepresented by literary agents.
In April of that year, I got a ride east with two
of Jean’s Drama students from Central State University who were auditioning to
get into the Drama department at Cornell University. From Cornell, I took a bus
to Boston and crashed in a co-ed dorm with a couple high school friends, Dan
Nadaner and Joe Tiffany, who were finishing up their undergrad careers at
Harvard, and then I went to New York to find out what was keeping my literary
career from taking off.
Interesting side note: while I was crashing at
Harvard, one of the guys I got to be friends with, Jerry Hiatt, was taking a
Creative Writing class from, you guessed it, Kurt Vonnegut.
In New York I stayed with my composer friend Scott
Oakley in his roach-infested apartment in Harlem and called the publisher to
inquire of The Apprenticeship of Abraham
Steinberg. After a long wait, a young woman came on the line and sweetly
explained that they did not read unsolicited manuscripts, but because I’d come
all this way she would read my manuscript and get back to me in a few days,
which she did.
I shaved, put on my cleanest shirt, and went down
to the snazzy publisher’s offices in the heart of Manhattan where a woman no
older than I met me in the lobby, handed me my manuscript, and said she really
enjoyed the story, that my writing reminded her of William Saroyan, keep trying,
and get a literary agent.
∆
A year or so later, I was living in a boarding
house in Santa Cruz and looking for a job when Rico called to say he and Jean
were getting married, would I come to Yellow Springs and sing at their wedding.
I said Yes and was so inspired by the invitation, I wrote a song especially for
the wedding and then wrote a collection of short stories entitled What Shall the Monster Sing? which I dedicated
to Rico and Jean.
That collection of stories ultimately landed me my
first and finest literary agent Dorothy Pittman, and contained a short story
about disabled folks hanging out in a bar that presaged my novel Inside Moves.
I flew to Ohio courtesy of Rico’s folks, stayed
with Jean and Rico for a week before the wedding, sang at the wedding, stayed
another week, and flew home. Singing for all those people at the wedding in the
glen in Yellow Springs, and singing again at the big reception at Jean’s
parents’ house in Cincinnati, along with writing that collection of stories
gave me a vision of how I wanted to proceed with my life, and I have stuck to
that course ever since.
∆
Five years later Dorothy Pittman sold my novel Inside Moves (original title The Gimp) to Doubleday. After I’d
rewritten the book with the help of my excellent editor Sherry Knox, Doubleday
sent forth the galleys and soon thereafter we had a big paperback sale and then
a movie sale, and a week after the movie sale I was summoned to Los Angeles to
meet with Bob Evans who had just made Love
Story, The Godfather, and Chinatown, and now wanted to make Inside Moves.
But rather than fly directly from my garret in
Seattle to LA, I stopped in San Francisco to commune with Rico. We stayed up
late talking and he drove me to the airport the next morning, his parting
words, “Call me if you need to talk.”
I landed in LA, got a cab to the Beverly Wilshire
with a Czechoslovakian driver who kept insisting I was Clint Eastwood, had
lunch with my new Hollywood agent Candace Lake and a vice-president at
Paramount, Nancy Hardin. After lunch Nancy dropped me off at Bob Evans’ mansion
and I met with Bob in the pool house next to his big swimming pool.
After a few niceties Bob Evans said, “You’ve
written a nice little fable here. I couldn’t put it down. But it’s too quirky,
too many cripples. You overdid the cripples. Don’t get me wrong, there are moments,
but the second act is a dud. We can fix this and it’ll be huge. So here’s what we’ll
do. We hold off on publishing while you rewrite the book the way I tell you to
rewrite it. That’s what I did with Love
Story. I told Segal what to write and he made millions and so will you.
We’ll get you a place in Malibu, a secretary, a cook, anything you need, and
we’ll get this done.”
I was in shock. Much to Bob’s chagrin, I did not
jump for joy, but said I would think about it. Somehow I got back to my room at
the Beverly Wilshire from where I called my sister who lived near UCLA and she
came and got me and I collapsed at her place.
I called my agent Dorothy Pittman and told her
what had happened. She said she would support whatever decision I made. The
book was to be published in just a few months. She had already heard from my
Hollywood agent and Nancy Hardin at Paramount both of whom had reiterated Bob’s
proposal to have me rewrite the book per his direction, for which I would be
handsomely recompensed, after which they would put big money into promoting the
book.
Then I called Rico. He listened in his patient way
and when I was done telling him what Evans wanted me to do, he said, “Your book
tells the truth, Murray. They’re afraid of the truth. Don’t let them wreck your
story. You’ll never be able to live with yourself if you do.”
And I did not rewrite the book for Bob Evans. He
hired Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin to write a screenplay that changed the main
character from a man crippled in Vietnam to a failed suicide, and they changed
the heroine from a woman with a leg shrunken by polio to a woman with two
gorgeous gams, and they changed Max from a man with no legs to a big strong
able-bodied guy, and some months later Bob Evans dropped the movie, Dick Donner
picked it up and shot Barry and Valerie’s script and added a revenge scene at
the end of the movie that was the antithesis of the spirit of the book and the antithesis of the rest of the movie.
But the novel Inside Moves came out as I wrote it, and the inspiring story of a friendship between two physically and emotionally challenged guys, versions of Rico and Murray, lives to this day, however humbly.
