experiment of the time. To be honest, I didn’t have the guts, even if I wanted to—and I didn’t want to, in the end. But that didn’t mean I was honest with my spouse or she with me. Perhaps influenced by the temper of the times, or just by our own characters, we did cheat on each other. As the Wine books and, consequently, my movie career, were mushrooming, my wife and one of my best friends—both of whom were writers, but frustrated in their careers—were having a long and involved affair. Of course, envy wasn’t their only motivation. I was plenty to blame myself. But by the Eighties, my marriage with Dyanne Asimow, from which we had two beautiful children, was dead. I was on my way as a grown man to live out the experiences most have as a teenager or young adult. I would be married again, this time for only a short while, and then have numerous relationships—sometimes telling myself it was for art—before winding up married a third time, happily and permanently. In a way, the Wine books can be looked upon as a hidden journal of my three marriages and those relationships.
All this was life imitating art imitating life imitating …For a while I was too busy living this out to write the book, so my editor Alan Rinzler, anxious to get a sequel published, invited me up to San Francisco to finish it. He locked me in the same room at the Seal Rock Inn where Hunter Thompson had just completed his latest book for Straight Arrow. We shared the same cleaning lady, who would come into the room while I banged away on my Selectric, look into the bathroom, and say, shaking her head, “Mr. Thompson—he had so many pills in that cabinet.” No doubt.
The only other visitor I had was Alan, who showed up early each evening for the pages (I was trying to knock out about ten per day), peruse them, and then work with me on where the next part of the story was headed. This reminded me of the way Hollywood “scribes” were said to have worked in the Thirties and Forties, passing the pages under the door to cigar-chomping producers. (Alan smoked joints incessantly.) One result of having an editor with me on a daily basis may have been that Wild Turkey (named for the bourbon swilled by the Hunter Thompson character) has the most carefully wrought plot of any of my books. I know this because it was so easy to adapt into a screenplay. I have personally worked on a film version of three of my books—The Big Fix, The Straight Man, and Wild Turkey—and Turkey worked most perfectly because of its tight plotting, an indispensable element of good screenwriting. At one point I expected Wild Turkey to be completed first, even though The Big Fix was the earlier book and had been under option already.
When The Big Fix came out, there was an immediate flutter of Hollywood attention. Mike Gruskoff, a classic movie producer with roots in the garment business, took the book to Twentieth Century Fox and the studio optioned it for the hot new director of the time—Martin Scorsese. I’d seen his groundbreaking Mean Streets, which I considered the best film by a new American director in years, and was thrilled. How could this be happening to me?
Well, it didn’t. I met with Marty, who seemed standoffish—curious, considering that he’d signed up to direct. After a few weeks he drifted out of contact. It turned out that something better—in his eyes, at least—had come up; he was off directing Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore with Ellen Burstyn. Gruskoff and I were left on our own. He suggested another director—a kid named Steven Spielberg who’d just made a television movie (Duel) everybody liked. He was supposedly interested in my book. I scoffed. How could this person, younger than I was by two or three years and a television (snort!) director to boot, understand the political nuances of my revolutionary novel? I remember having several arguments about this with Gruskoff, who—for some misguided reason—thought that I was being belligerent and selfish. What’d he know? He was a dumb producer from the schmatta business, no less. Besides, in my heart of hearts, I thought I should direct the movie. Who was this Spielberg? Soon enough, Stephen had drifted away as well, leaving Mike and me to develop the script on our own. It was never made. Within two years, Spielberg had directed both Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Looking back, I think I must have been an arrogant idiot to pass up what could have been a life-changing opportunity. (It wasn’t the only time that happened. Years later I told my agent I had no interest in adapting the dull novel that had been submitted to me—Forrest Gump.) But Hollywood is like that: halfway between the stock market and Las Vegas. You’re never sure where you stand and when to jump in or out.
And I did get a second chance. Just after Wild Turkey was published, there was another round of buzz. Someone even told me that Warren Beatty was showing up at parties with a copy of my book in his hip pocket, telling people he wanted to play the lead. Flattering though it was, that seemed strange to me. The very WASP-y Beatty didn’t seem like much of a fit with the Jewish Moses Wine (I’d imagined Dreyfuss from the start), and in those days I had no idea Beatty was remotely political. I still saw him as the pretty boy who made his mark opposite Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass and then continued to amass a long list of equally glamorous leading ladies. In any event, nothing happened and that gossip disappeared into the great maw of the movie business when Warner Brothers bought the rights to Wild Turkey for producer Gene Corman, brother of the notorious Roger Corman of low-budget horror fame.
I worked on a script for Gene, which, to my surprise and pleasure, the studio actually liked on its first submission. Everything moved swiftly. Gene, the Warners executive in charge of the project, and I agreed that Richard Dreyfuss should play Moses. Richard was living in Malibu then, not working. I heard the studio was about to make him a “pay-or-play” offer (usually a guarantee of production, as they didn’t want to “pay” without the “play”) of $500,000—a decent fee in 1975. I also heard that Richard was primed to accept it. All that we needed was the final okay from former agent Ted Ashley, who was then CEO of Warners.
It never came. The script was placed in the dreaded “turn-around,” a process by which the studio returns the now tarnished screenplay to the producer to find financing elsewhere—not an easy thing, since the original studio usually attaches onerous inflated costs. Corman, however, was determined to get my script done, convincing me against my better judgment to bowdlerize my work in the time-honored Hollywood tradition. First we made Moses Wine not Jewish (Jewish characters were generally considered a no-no, despite the large number of Jews in the Industry), then not a detective (there were too many detective movies—we made him city attorney); then we moved the locale from Los Angeles to Atlanta. None of this worked, as acts of desperation rarely do.
The whole affair made me depressed and ornery, so, again in the time-honored Hollywood tradition, I blamed my agent. At this point it was William Morris, but I had several suitors, including Ziegler Ross and Adams, Ray & Rosenberg, both known as respected “literary” agencies. (I put that in quotes because what passed for literary in Hollywood would set eyes rolling in Manhattan. They were the best of a dubious crop.) The Morris office knew that I was ready to jump and asked what they could do for me. I said that whatever it was, they should do it soon, because I was considering other options.
They were aware of Warren Beatty’s interest in my books. He was a William Morris client, so I had an appointment with him almost immediately; as luck would have it, he lived in a penthouse at the top of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, only a moment’s walk from William Morris.
I don’t remember my heart thumping as I rode up the private elevator at the Wilshire, but it surely must have been. It’s hard to fix dates so long ago, but it had to have been late 1975 or early 1976, as you will see. The elevator opened on Beatty’s apartment, which, though it was supposed to be a penthouse, didn’t seem remotely like one. It was a dank place, books and scripts scattered about, making it more like the home of a messy grad student than of a movie star. Warren, who was sitting in the middle of this jumble in his shirtsleeves, gestured for me to enter. He was on the phone but was off quickly and flashed the charismatic smile that the world knew well from the movies.
Beatty’s “star wattage” was at its peak, thanks to a virtually unbroken line of hits from Bonnie
