A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern
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A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern. (Review)_(book review) George
Plimpton.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Harper's Magazine Foundation
A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern, by Lee Hill. HarperCollins,
2001. 343 pages. $30.
In my bachelor days, Terry Southern often stayed in my apartment in New York,
usually when I was there but often when I wasn't. Sometimes he called when I
was in a hotel room on the West Coast to tell me, in his manner, that all was
well. A party was inevitably going on: I could hear the chink of glasses, a
distant piano, and laughter in the background. Other times he would forget when
I was actually in town, and I'd come home from the library or a dinner party to
find his friends seated on the floor, lighted candles on the sideboard, someone
playing the guitar. Once, late at night, when I arrived with a girl on my arm,
I opened the apartment door to find the usual crowd and Terry at the controls
of a movie projector. He was showing a blue movie (as they were called at the
time). He had taken down a framed poster, and the film was showing on the bare
wall. I had just a glimpse of a naked man in black stockings and a mask
approaching a woman on a bed, similarly attired (this was the norm in the
X-rated films of the day), before Terry held his hand over the muzzle of the
projector to block my view--too late.
I can't recall the aftermath Of all this. To impress the girl, I suspect I put
on an air of being properly indignant. I have the vague impression of Terry's
guests, many of them my friends, sloping out of the apartment.
I had known Terry since the early fifties, the start-up days of the Paris
Review. Along with many other American veterans, he had taken advantage of the
G.I. Bill of Rights and was in Paris to study at the Sorbonne. Almost everyone
took Le Cours de la Civilisation Francaise, which the university authorities
had set up, one felt, in gratitude for American assistance in the liberation of
their country. Attendance was not taken, nor were exams given.
Terry spent four years in Paris, many of his waking hours in the cafes, and
especially the jazz clubs, on the Left Bank. At that point, soon after the war,
Paris was a kind of culture dish for writers beginning their careers. It was
outlandishly inexpensive, possible to get by on thirty dollars or so a week.
And, of course, the lure of the city had something to do with it--the literary
crop on hand included, among others, Richard Wright, Jimmy Baldwin, William
Styron, Peter Matthiessen, Evan S. Connell, James Salter, Mary Lee Settle,
Alice Adams, and Mordecai Richler.
And Terry Southern. I probably met him in the Old Navy, a closet-sized bistro
off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and surely at the Cafe de Tournon, near the
Jardin du Luxembourg, where the Paris Review people tended to hang out. Terry
was slim, quite shy, I thought, but with an easy grace at making
friends--soft-spoken, courtly, rather owlish (indeed, for a time he kept a
small caged owl in his rented room). I remember him particularly for his manner
of speech. Although he was born in Texas (a cotton-crop town named Alvarado),
he affected a curious, mock high-society English-gentry way of talking,
complete with little harrumphs ("What? What?") delivered in fits and starts,
with words often abbreviated in hipster style ("fab" for fabulous), and marked
with qualifying endearments such as "Big Billy Faulk" for William Faulkner or
"Tip Top Tony" for the movie director Tony Richardson. His speech was unique
and not at all unlike (I once wrote) Goofy's, if that Disney character had been
born an earl. These stylistic oddities turned up in Terry's prose in the form
of italics, ellipses, exclamation points--obvious precursors of Tom Wolfe's
distinctive style.
This year has seen the appearance of two welcome new Terry Southern books, one
about him and the other by him. The first, a biography by Lee Hill entitled A
Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern, is a labor of ten years' work,
years well spent in that Hill has filled in much of the background to
Southern's career, parts of which have always remained shadowy even to his
friends. A Grand Guy provides a unique portrait not only of a somewhat
self-doomed writer but of the various cultures--Hollywood in particular--that
exacerbated his problems. Hill is a Canadian journalist who had the benefit of
knowing Southern for five years, so that pertinent interviews and reminiscences
appear throughout the book.
The second of these titles, Now Dig This, is a wild, utterly diverse collection
put together by Terry's son, Nile, and Josh Alan Friedman. At the very least,
it shows the wide range of Terry's targets, none of them treated with any
reverence whatsoever--typical is a satirical letter to the editor of Ms.
magazine, in which he argues that women will never gain equal rights until they
quit making animalistic noises in bed. Throughout the collection, his prose
displays the qualities best summed up by Norman Mailer: "clean, mean, coolly
deliberate, and murderous."
The first piece of fiction I saw of his was, as it happened, instrumental in
the birth of the Paris Review--a short story (actually a section of his first
novel, Flash and Filigree) that persuaded Peter Matthiessen and Harold L. Humes
to scrap the Paris-based New Yorker imitation they had in mind and start a
purely literary magazine. They asked me to come over from Cambridge University
after graduation to help out. Terry's story, entitled "The Accident," was
published in the magazine's first issue (Spring 1953), and it caused no end of
trouble. The story contained the word "shit," this in a sentence in which a
police officer is trying to calm down an irate motorist: "Don't get your shit
hot."
The problem was that back in the fifties, U.S. Customs inspected magazines and
books printed abroad with extraordinary care, page by page, looking for words
of the four-letter variety that could get the whole lot confiscated and indeed
burned on a city dump. Customs officials rummaged through shirt fronts looking
for the distinctive pale green covers of the Olympia Press "Traveller's
Companion" series (Henry Miller's Plexus, Pauline Reage's Story of O, Nabokov's
Lolita) and plucking them forth as if worms from a salad.
The man in charge of the customs operations in New York was a Mr. Demcy, and on
a number of occasions in the fifties I went down to his office on Varick Street
to discuss the incoming shipments of the Paris Review. We often discussed the
magazine's readership. My concept was that a typical reader was a retired
English professor living in a snowbound cabin in the mountains of Vermont,
whose work had been rejected by the magazine, and whose contempt for what he
was reading in its most recent pages would surely cause him to toss the thing
into the Franklin stove. Mr. Demcy, on the other hand, pictured a typical
subscriber as a family man, surrounded by the accoutrements of a suburban
country home--children underfoot, a large dog. It was his belief that an
inquisitive preteen (what Mr. Demcy referred to as a "susceptible reader")
would inevitably pick up a copy of the Paris Review and discover a word quite
new to him or her. "Dad, what does this mean?"--this simple question throwing
the family into confusion, despair, and revulsion.
Given such a restrictive climate (it went on until the late fifties, when the
censorship codes began to weaken), one can understand the soul-searching that
went on over the s-word in Terry's "The Accident." Eventually the word "crap"
was substituted for "shit," and finally, at the last--and I blush to admit as
much--I took out the word "crap," which resulted in the utterly bland phrase,
particularly from the mouth of an arresting officer in Texas, "Don't get hot."
Terry was quite properly incensed. He stormed into our little office on the Rue
Garanciere and demanded that we publish a wordy document of apology and
explanation that would have taken up a third of the magazine. Finally, to
placate him, an erratum notice was published (it was written by Peter
Matthiessen), which read:
Terry Southern is most anxious that the Paris Review point out the absence
of two words from his story "The Accident" (issue one): The sentence "Don't
get hot" should have read "Don't get your crap hot," an omission for which
we apologize to all concerned.
In Paris the only release from such restrictions was to give up any thought of
moral virtue and write for Maurice Girodias, the publisher of the Olympia
Press. He paid up to $1,000 for db's (short for "dirty books")--an enormous sum
in those days, surely enough to sustain anyone living in meager quarters on the
Left Bank for a year, if not longer. I tried one, based loosely on Robert Louis
Stevenson's story "The Suicide Club," about a group of adventurers, bored with
life, who decide to do away with one another in elaborate games of murder
played out in a castle. In my version the castle was overrun with women, and
the crimes were sexual and macabre. The girl with whom I was in love at the
time burst into tears when she read the opening chapters. Girodias looked at me
oddly when he handed the manuscript back across his desk. Terry was amused to
the point of little tsk tsks of mock dismay ("What! What? Not quite got the
hang of it, eh, old chap?").
He was beginning to work on his own db at the time, a short novel ("de luxe
porn") entitled Candy, surely one of the more notorious examples of the genre.
Its main character, vaguely based on Voltaire's Candide, is an impressionable
young girl, pert (one of Terry's favorite words), innocent, who gives herself
over to a psychotic hunchback. "Give me your hump!"--a line from the book--was
a form of greeting one heard around the cafes for a while. The orgasm scene in
Candy has her berserk with lust: "`Fuck! Shit! Piss!' she screamed. `Cunt!
Cock! Crap! Prick! Kike! Nigger! Wop! Hump! HUMP!'"
One can imagine the effect this extraordinary sentence had on Mr. Demcy of the
U.S. Customs.
While Terry was working on the first drafts of Candy he asked a friend, a young
ex-G.I. named Mason Hoffenberg, a copy editor at the Agence France-Presse, who
had written two books for Girodias--Sin for Breakfast (as Hamilton Drake) and
Until She Screams (as Faustino Perez)--to help with Candy. Working together
(Hoffenberg was responsible for a number of the book's odd characters,
including Dr. Krankheit, the author of the Wilhelm Reich-like manifesto,
Masturbation Now!), the pair finished their manuscript in 1958 and chose the
arty name "Maxwell Kenton" as the author (it was thought best to disguise one's
name in case of future fame). Candy appeared in October, number 64 in the
Traveller's Companion series. It caused a considerable stir. Indeed, the Paris
vice squad stepped in and banned it, which bothered Girodias not a whit: two
months later Candy appeared with a new title, Lollipop, which, for some reason,
escaped the vice squad's notice.
With the relaxation of the obscenity laws in the United States, Candy was
eventually published by G. P. Putnam, both authors using their real names.
Terry once told me that Candy had sold more than 5 million copies. The
publishing records show that it sold about 140,000 copies in 1964 alone; it
reached number two on the fiction best-seller list, after John le Carre's Spy
Who Came In from the Cold. Because of loopholes in the copyright laws, pirated
editions, and utter confusion as to the book's legal status, Terry made very
little money from its success--not substantially more than the $500 he was
originally paid by Girodias.
I don't remember Terry talking much about Candy in those early days--perhaps a
rueful smile when a friend would catch sight of him at a cafe and call out,
"Give me your hump!" Of far more concern to him was his work in what he
famously referred to as the "Quality Lit Game."
Flash and Filigree, though turned down by more than a score of American
publishers, was finally published in England by Andre Deutsch. It caught the
attention of the British novelist Henry Green, who pronounced it (in the
Observer) "the novel of the year"--more than welcome news to Terry, who had
become obsessed with Green's novels, each with its one-word title: Doting,
Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding. He wrote Green a fan letter, which to his
surprise was answered; a correspondence ensued, and the two eventually met in
London, the start of a long friendship.
Terry interviewed Henry Green for the Paris Review (the result is included in
Now Dig This). Two of Green's responses were especially meaningful to Terry;
or, more likely, they reinforced his own views. One was Green's response on
being asked about the role of humor in the novel: "Surely the artist must
entertain," he said. "And one's in a very bad way indeed if one can't laugh.
Laughter relaxes the characters in a novel. And if you can make the reader
laugh he is apt to get careless and go on reading."
The other was in reply to a question about films. Green's comment was that the
"novelist is a communicator and must therefore be interested in any form of
communication." Since the consensus at the time among most serious writers was
that working in any way with television or the movies was "selling out," it
must have startled Terry that Green thought otherwise.
The mid-fifties and sixties were a pivotal time for Terry. He moved back to New
York. In 1956 he married a young painter named Carol Kauffman, who was studying
for an M.A. in early childhood education. They lived for a while (when he
wasn't hanging out in my place) on a barge based in Far Rockaway. Terry's work
began to appear in major magazines--Esquire, the Evergreen Review, Glamour, The
New York Times Book Review. From 1960 to 1962 he wrote reviews and opinion
pieces for The Nation, among them prescient evaluations of the work of Henry
Miller, William S. Burroughs, John Barth, Harry Mathews, Peter Matthiessen, and
Kurt Vonnegut. The giddier side of his aesthetic appeared in the anticultural
Realist, quirky, highly salacious contributions with titles like "Scandale at
the Dumpling Shop," a story that featured toy dolls outfitted with "teeny
tampons." He became a regular with the artistic and literary crowds--the Beats
in particular--and an increasingly high-ranking personage in his self-named
Quality Lit Game. He bought a farm in East Canaan, Connecticut. Carol had a
son, whom they named Nile. Candy was in print. A new novel, The Magic
Christian, had been accepted by Random House. The book was about a
multimillionaire, Guy Grand, whose pleasure in life is to use his millions to
startle the electorate, "making it hot for them." His pranks include bringing a
howitzer along on a big-game hunt, entering a panther in a dog show, bribing
(for a million dollars, tax-free) an actress to depart from the text and
address the live television audience: "Anyone who would allow this slobbering
pomp and drivel in his home has less sense and taste than the beasts of the
field."
The actor Peter Sellers, delighted with the lunacy of the book, bought one
hundred copies of The Magic Christian, one of which he gave to Stanley Kubrick,
who was then about to begin filming Dr. Strangelove. The script at that point
was closely based on Peter George's novel Red Alert, a melodrama about the
destruction of the world when a crazed commander dispatches a flight of nuclear
bombers to obliterate the Soviet Union. According to Terry, Kubrick woke up one
morning and realized that the destruction of the world could not be treated "in
any conventionally dramatic fashion," and could only see it as a hideous joke.
Because he liked the humor of The Magic Christian, he hired Terry to transform
the film from melodrama into black comedy. I remember the telegram inviting
Terry to London. It arrived at my house, where he was staying on one of his
periodic visits. He showed it to me--an offer of eight "profitable" weeks in
London, a place Terry referred to as "Old Smoke."
Terry's decision to leave for London and the movie business pretty much marked
the end of his literary career. It was made--like most moves of that
kind--largely because of financial need: a family to support with hardly a
sufficient income from serious writing to do so. And, of course, with Henry
Green's blessing.
He turned out to be remarkably good at it. His film scripts are models of
clarity, the scenes set with a novelist's skill, the dialogue sharp and yet
invariably bearing traces of the confusion and complexity of communication that
he and Green so often discussed. Terry often referred to his screen-writing as
"brightening and tightening," which seems too mild a way to express what he
could do. Consider the scripts of the famous phone conversation in Dr.
Strangelove between the president of the United States (Merkin Muffley in
Terry's version--making up "funny" names was a constant diversion) and the
leader of the Soviet Union (Premier Kissoff)--the former breaking the news that
by error nuclear bombers are on their way. Here's the original script as
written by Peter George and Stanley Kubrick:
You know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going
wrong? ... With the H-Bomb ... Uh-huh ... that's right ... Well, it
happened ... Hello? ... Can you still hear me? What? ... Not
missiles--planes ... that's right ... B-90s ... That's right ...
Thirty-four of them ... In about an hour and a half ... Uh-huh ... Uh-huh
... Uh-huh ... Well, how do you think I feel about it? ... I know that ...
Uh-huh ... Uh-huh ... Well, why do you think I'm calling you? ... to work
something out on this disarmament thing ... Uh-huh ... Sure, but you
haven't been reasonable ... Uh-huh ... Uh-huh ... Look, Belch ... Look,
we're wasting time ... Uh-huh ... a base commander ... We're not sure ...
Well, we think he's gone psycho ... Had a mental breakdown ... We're trying
to do that ... We're doing that right now ... Well, we've got our fingers
crossed ... we're hoping ... We're trying that too ...
Here's the same scene after Terry's suggestions:
Now then, Dimitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility
of something going wrong with the bomb. The bomb, Dimitri, the Hydrogen
bomb. Well, what happened is, uh, one of our base commanders, he had a sort
of, well, he went a little funny in the head. You know, just a little
funny. And--uh--he went and did a silly thing. Well, I'll tell you what he
did. He ordered his planes to attack your country. Uh--well, let me finish,
Dimitri ... let me finish, Dimitri. Well, listen, how do you think I feel
about it? Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dimitri? Why do you think
I'm calling you? Just to say hello? Of course I like to speak to you. Of
course I like to say hello. Not now but any time, Dimitri. I'm just calling
up to tell you something terrible has happened. It's a friendly call, of
course, it's a friendly call. Listen, if it wasn't a friendly call you
probably wouldn't have even got it.
Dr. Strangelove became a great hit, and with its success Terry became highly
sought-after. He brought his "brightening and tightening" techniques to William
Wyler's The Collector, a film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, film
scripts for Candy and The Magic Christian, The Cincinnati Kid, a Western called
Something Else, Casino Royale, Barbarella, among many others. And, of course,
Easy Rider.
Terry was always very bitter about his experience with Easy Rider, the famous
biker film starring Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, which brought Jack Nicholson
out of obscurity through his portrayal of the recovering alcoholic ACLU lawyer
George Hanson. The film was made on such a shoe-string, with so little hope of
financial return, that Terry took no more notice of a possible profit than he
did of business affairs in general. For a film that made, according to Terry,
more than $50 million, he was paid only $3,900, with residuals rarely amounting
to more than $100 a year. Particularly galling was Dennis Hopper's contention
that Southern's contribution was minimal--a view somewhat disapproved by a
court case in which Terry was able to produce an original script and Hopper was
not.
Still, the success of Easy Rider made Terry a familiar figure in Hollywood
circles, especially in the cool, hip crowd beginning to influence the film
culture; he relished their acceptance, and of course they were delighted to
have him around. He was always very proud of being included in the famous group
collage used for the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, in which the band
members are flanked by a number of cult figures--living and dead--thought to be
representative of the sixties. Terry is tucked into a group with Oscar Wilde,
Lenny Bruce, and Edgar Allan Poe. He peeks out from among the others, wearing a
pair of shades, the only one on the cover so equipped. In a sense it is an
almost unbelievably appropriate grouping, considering that Terry had a Wildean
comic slant on manners, the acidity and black humor of a Lenny Bruce, and, as
for Poe, he was an early influence. Terry's mother gave him a copy of Poe's
novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym when he was nine. "It was an
extraordinary turn-on for a young Western lout," Terry said in an interview
that appears in A Grand Guy. "Nine years old, and I was already hooked on
weirdo lit. But in the best possible way, because if pot leads to cocaine, E.
A. Poe surely leads to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Joyce, Kafka, Celine,
Faulkner, Nathanael West, Sartre, et cetera, et cetera, ad gloriam."
No sooner had Terry discovered Poe than he started rewriting the author's
stories and, as he put it, "taking them further"--substituting the names of
schoolmates for Poe's characters and subjecting them to outlandish experiences,
"gross weird."
His notion of "taking it further" crops up in any number of his collaborations.
He wrote a sequence in the movie The Loved One that is not in the novel but
that he thought faithful to Waugh's intentions--a relationship between the
Whispering Glades cemetery and NASA that allowed the remains of the deceased to
be shot into space in a rocket. Jonathan Winters is the star of the weird
launch scene, in which, as an entrepreneur in the funeral business, he shouts
the countdown into a public address system: "... 4,3,2,1 Resurrection Now!!"
During his Hollywood years, Terry did only the occasional magazine piece, in
particular a famous Esquire report on the Democratic Convention in Chicago in
1968, which he covered with William Burroughs and Jean Genet. But there was
little else. In the late seventies he tried to link the two vocations of
screen- and novel-writing with a book entitled Blue Movie. His idea was not
only that Blue Movie would become a best-seller but that the movie made from it
would mark a huge step forward in the film industry by being the first "full-on
erection-and-penetration movie using big-name stars."
The novel, which The World Publishing Co. brought out in 1970, was not a
success, many critics dismissing it as a recycling of Candy. The New York Times
refused to print ads for it at all. Terry told me wryly that he'd heard Mrs.
Bennett Cerf had thrown the manuscript into the fire. Actually, the film very
nearly got made. John Calley, an adventuresome producer at Warner Brothers (he
had produced The Loved One) and later the president of United Artists, was
especially enthusiastic. He kept announcing, "It'll be like Gone with the
Wind!" Mike Nichols was to direct, and somehow Julie Andrews, the star of Mary
Poppins, among other wholesome vehicles, had been persuaded to play the girl. I
remember staring at Terry when I heard this. "Julie Andrews?"
In the eighties everything began to go sour for Terry. A divorce. The
script-writing, though he kept at it, never reached the production stage. His
brand of humor no longer seemed in vogue. He had a serious problem with drugs
and alcohol and the fast company he was keeping. He found himself in terrible
financial straits, brought on by his years of living so far beyond his means
that it almost seemed as if he was trying to emulate his character Guy Grand.
His problems were compounded by a string of years when he didn't pay any taxes.
At one point he was so strapped for cash that he walked into the offices of The
National Lampoon and offered to write anything for $100 a shot. The editors
(for whom he was an icon) paid him substantially more for his efforts; as
usual, many pieces were based on bizarre sexual practices, boasting such titles
as "Hard-Corpse Pornography," "Puritan Porn," and "Strange Sex We Have
Known"--this last a collaborative work with William Burroughs. Finally, his
health began to go. A stroke.
In September 1994, Terry received the Gotham Writer Award, a prestigious honor
bestowed by the Independent Feature Project at an annual affair, held that year
at New York's Roseland Ballroom. I had the pleasure of introducing him to a
crowd that roared its welcome as he stepped slowly up onto a small temporary
stage. He was heavy then--dissipation had taken its toll (he had "overcooked,"
as one artist friend put it)--and he pushed himself up the steps with a cane. I
don't recall that he said more than a sentence or two before turning away from
the microphone. But what happened next was appropriate: on a big screen above
him the lines he had written for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove spoke for
him: the scene in the War Room. When the scuffling started, the audience roared
at the famous line: "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the War Room!"
He died not long after, at the age of seventy-one. He had begun teaching a
screen-writing course at Columbia University, sending back his students'
scripts highlighted with yellow Post-it notes: "... never hold back for good
taste ... never say just red dress. Be specific: ultra-revealing micro-mini
with fringe."
One day, on his way to class, Terry collapsed on the steps of Dodge Hall. He
died in the hospital. His last words, as remembered by his son, were, "Yes ...
yes ... time for a bit of shut-eye ... bedways is rightways now."
His output for a major writer had been remarkably limited--five slender novels
and two books of short pieces. There are the screenplays, of course, but they
were collaborative efforts for the most part, his contributions obscured by the
bigger names involved, so that just a few lines of attributable dialogue
remain. Yet he remains a substantial figure to many, admirers of his
willingness to take outrageous risks with his characters and plots, and
especially of his sly, often perverted sense of humor. He seemed incapable of
taking anything very seriously; even eulogies composed for friends invariably
contained a bawdy phrase or two, or a scene, which disqualified them from use
at a funeral service. He wrote wonderful, outrageous letters to his friends.
At the last, in an attempt to get back into the Quality Lit Game, Terry went
back to work on a novel he had started in 1973. He'd titled it Double Date. He
had picked an appropriate epigram for it, an Arthur Miller line: "There is no
power on Earth that can break the grip of a man with his hands on his own
throat."
Not long after Terry died, I drove through a winter storm to his country home
in East Canaan, close by the Blackberry River, a white-clapboard, rambling
farmhouse in which, Terry once told me, Benedict Arnold had stayed, recovering
from gunshot wounds. My hope was to rummage through Terry's manuscripts and
find something for a commemorative section in the Paris Review. Gail Gerber,
his longtime girlfriend, met me. She apologized for the house being in such
disorder--packing boxes everywhere, furniture askew. She looked through some
odds and ends in a darkened room and brought out a sword cane she thought Terry
would have liked me to have. I remember drawing the sword part out of its
sheath to look at it.
At nightfall she went to a social function in town, leaving me alone in the
house. I was looking through a cardboard box full of Terry's manuscripts when,
from upstairs, I heard a sound that had nothing to do with the wind and the
banging of shutters, something moving that was not of the rhythm of the storm.
It was eerie enough that I stopped what I was doing, and, with my newly
acquired sword cane--why not?--I crept up the stairs. When I reached the top
landing I turned to look down a long corridor. To my astonishment, a face
appeared from a door down at the far end, just a foot or so off the floor, as
if the person to whom it belonged had crouched on all fours to look out, a long
face, almost luminously pale in the darkness. It reminded me instantly of
Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Scream: the masklike face used so
effectively in horror movies. Impulsively, I brought the sword blade forth from
its sheath.
I don't know what I would have done if the face had retreated back into the
room--perhaps gone back downstairs and stepped out into the winter storm. But
then the face emerged a little farther, and I could see that it was Terry's
dog, Belle, a mixed-breed Belgian shepherd that looked like a wolf and had
followed him everywhere. She was now white-faced with age.
It didn't strike me until later how amused Terry would have been at the thought
of an old friend standing, half-drawn sword in hand, heart beating fast,
staring down the hall at his ancient dog.
George Plimpton is the author of a number of books, including Paper Lion,
Shadow Box, and the
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