Ken. The pain he’d endured in his personal life made this generosity of spirit all the more impressive. (He and author Margaret Millar’s only child was a disturbed young woman who, like one of the disappearing children in Ken’s own novels, ran away from home and spent time in Camarillo State Mental Hospital before dying of a brain hemorrhage at thirty-one.) There was a nobility to the man similar to the honorable knight critics and readers found in his protagonist Lew Archer. I didn’t quite realize it then, but when Ken wrote of my work that I was “the most brilliant new writer of private detective fiction who has emerged in some years” and that “The Big Fix, like The Big Sleep, should become something of a landmark in its field,” he was giving me a gift that would ensure the book’s success with good reviews, foreign translations, and literary prizes.
Those prizes included that year’s Best First Mystery from the Crime Writers of Great Britain, a group traditionally unfriendly to American authors. Hugely flattered, I flew to London for the awards banquet. Also in attendance was my actor friend Richard Dreyfuss, who, after many ups and downs, would play Moses Wine in The Big Fix movie six years later.
Richard, who had just made his first sensation at twenty-four in American Graffiti, was in London playing the lead in an art film. He sat in the back of the banquet room, calling attention to himself by breaking in on the proceedings sotto voce. The fusty British authors on the dais were clearly put off, and I was embarrassed. Richard was there at my behest. Soon enough, the self-aggrandizement was mercifully over and I accepted the award from Dick Francis, the dean of British crime writers and the author of dozens of horse racing mysteries. I remember that he introduced me as a soon-to-be “old lag,” British parlance for someone who writes workmanlike thrillers year after year and then goes to his grave. Was this what I wanted to be? The room seemed to be full of them. I had more interest in Dreyfuss, despite his narcissistic outbursts and even though I knew that dealing with movie stars like him would be complicated at best.
What I didn’t realize is that years later Richard and I—then comrades, as he came from a socialist background—would be on differing sides politically, although in Richard’s case those differences would be nuanced. Unlike like many actors, he was an intelligent man who actually read books before he spouted off. But what I was watching back then in London was a need for the limelight under any circumstances—a need that almost always carries through for actors. In those days, this wasn’t a problem for me, because many of those actors identified with Moses Wine, wanted to be seen as the “hero of the people,” especially if that hero was a private dick who acted heroically and got the girls.
Of course, not everyone liked The Big Fix. I got my biggest pushback from those “girls,” more specifically “women,” because the book was published in 1973, when the Women’s Liberation Movement was sweeping the intelligentsia. It had hit my own household with a vengeance. Dyanne was a founding member of one of the first women’s consciousness-raising groups in LA, probably in the country. Most members of the group were in the media and film—among them journalist Marcia Seligson, filmmaker Lynne Littman (who made the 1983 anti-nuke melodrama Testament), and graphic artist Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, who helped establish the Women’s Building in downtown Los Angeles. They met weekly in one of the women’s homes, including ours, and I remember listening to their conversations from the second floor balcony, a male spy on the women’s movement, nervous that I’d fall off and make a spectacle of myself.
Some of these consciousness-raising discussions were earnest and theoretical, but the more interesting ones contained personal gossip about the women themselves and the men in their lives—who was sleeping with whom, who was a male chauvinist pig or a philanderer, and what the women themselves were up to. And everyone was up to a lot. This was the era when sexual liberation was in the air and monogamy challenged as a form of male oppression or just old-fashioned bourgeois repression. Whatever the case, sexual politics and plain old ordinary sex of the libidinal variety were getting mixed up as never before.
This got more intense when a men’s consciousness-raising group was formed as a rejoinder to the women’s group, in a fit of what might be described as vagina envy. If the women could get together and dish, the men could, too—so long as they couched it in the self-abnegating rhetoric of the era. Along with me in this partly self-lacerating but superficially political endeavor was a similar group of young and ambitious LA artsy types, including the soon-to-be directors Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious) and Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman, married then to Lynne Littman in the women’s group, now to Helen Mirren), architect Peter de Bretteville (married to Sheila Levrant de Bretteville), the photographer Ben Lifson (married to poetess Martha Lifson in the women’s group), painter Lance Richbourg, and lawyer Tom Pollack, who was then the attorney of wunderkind George Lucas and one day would be the head of Universal Studios. We seemed to be a high-powered cabal in the making, paying ritual obeisance to breaking the shackles of male chauvinism.
Well, not completely. What soon evolved is that Ben Lifson was having an open affair (open to us, anyway) with the girlfriend of one of the youngest men in our group. His name was Steve—I can’t remember his surname, but that’s just as well—and he happened to be a photography student of Lifson’s at Cal Arts. This was all a subject of constant men’s group discussion. “Open marriage” was trendy then and we had before us a living, breathing example of it. Within a few weeks, however, all theory was going out the window as the sordidness of the reality set in. Members of the group justifiably grew to hate Ben and to pity the pathetic Steve. I say pathetic because he went along with this without doing the natural thing—kicking Ben in the balls—while justifying his inaction in the now comical ideological rhetoric of the period.
Against this background I began to conceive Wild Turkey, the second Moses Wine novel, which was deliberately more comic than its predecessor. People had told me The Big Fix was funny. That was news to me, but I accepted it, nodding as if the humor was intentional. It may be that the best comedy is unintentional—it’s simply the honest observation of reality. But for the next book, I decided to be more overt about it.
At the beginning of the new novel, Moses—who’d become a minor celebrity from his Big Fix adventure—is burst in on at three in the morning by Dr. Gunther Thomas, a not very well disguised version of Hunter Thompson, the ‘gonzo’ journalist and author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Dr. Thomas wants to do a profile of the “hippie Sam Spade” for Rolling Stone. He’s even got a case for Wine. The best-selling author Jock Hecht—a Norman Mailer-type who has written a notorious book on sexual freedom—is wanted for the murder of the anchorwoman on a TV morning news program. He needs someone to help get him off. Trouble is, Moses’s “ex” is in India with her guru and has left him with their young kids, one of who is still in diapers (the Women’s Lib angle!) and constantly in need of a change. Undeterred, Dr. Gunther Thomas grabs Moses and the kids, and off we go.
The plot, as it is with these stories, is intentionally convoluted, but suffice it to say that Jock Hecht himself is murdered in short order. Moses is hired by Jock’s attractive widow, Nancy, who reveals (shades of the men’s consciousness group) that she and Jock had had an open marriage. It had been Jock’s idea, with Nancy going along grudgingly. She and Moses are kindred spirits in that regard. They both recoil from open marriage, but feel guilty or a little square or a combination of the two for being so conventional. Naturally, they fall for each other, but due to the conventions of the genre, their romance is not to be.
Reflecting on this today, with the perspective of over three decades, it’s hard to believe that we were all so naïve about marriage. (It’s not hard to believe, however, that this story attracted Warren Beatty—but more on that later.) Basing human relationships on ideology is almost comically absurd and most often a convenient lie. But I did enjoy writing—and, yes, I admit, to researching—the scenes set at a sexual freedom “institute” in Topanga Canyon—the same one (Sandstone) that had been the basis for Gay Talese’s notorious “new journalist” studies of American mores.
It’s
