The View from the Bridge (6 page)

As suddenly as all the activity started, it stopped. As I was to learn, this is a feast or famine business. You're hot, you're in demand, you're making a living. Then you're high and dry, out of fashion, out of cash . . .

And then the WGA goes on strike.

STRIKE!

The 1972 Writers
Guild strike changed my life dramatically. There's lots to be said about the Guild, but for the moment I'll confine myself to the strike itself, which required me to picket outside the (then) Goldwyn studios at Santa Monica and Formosa for three hours a day, four days a week, carrying a placard. All writers are frustrated actors; now here we were, starring in our own production of
Waiting for Lefty Meets On the Waterfront While Waiting for Bardot
, shouldering our picket signs as though they were rifles and we, the workers on the front lines of the proletarian revolution. Writers of the world unite; we had nothing to lose but our subordinate clauses.

We all picketed with a partner. After three hours walking with him or her in a long oval, with the sun beating down on the pavement (and us), we learned more than we ever cared to know about him—and vice versa, natch. I picketed with an older man named Al Beich who had written a lot of
Mannix
episodes. One day when our shift was finished, he invited me back to his place for a drink.

“Just follow my car,” he offered by way of directions. In LA you measure places by the time in takes to reach them, not how many miles there are between them. “It's about ten minutes,” Al said.

The car of this proletarian revolutionary turned out to be a vintage green Rolls-Royce convertible. I followed it west on Sunset Boulevard until we turned into the driveway of the most opulent building north of Sunset, the one everyone stares at from his car and wonders about, a European-looking stone mansion of enormous proportions and (relative) age, situated on the primest real estate in town.

Mannix
paid for this? Maybe I should think twice about episodic television.

It turned out that Al (who was in his sixties) was in fact part of the enormously wealthy Beich candy family, and that it was his (much older) sister, Mary—who was never there—who actually owned the place. It further turned out that Mary was herself the much younger widow of Wyatt Earp's lawyer, a man named McCarthy (you following this? you believe this?) for whom the place had been built by Italian artisans, imported from Italy for the purpose. (They probably stayed to work on Griffith's sets for
Intolerance
when they were finished.)

The estate was like Norma Desmond's mansion in
Sunset Blvd.
, a miniature palazzo, complete with marbled-floored ballroom, a kitchen larger than my entire one-room flat, a stage (for live theatrical productions) in the basement, along with hundreds of polo mallets suspended from the ceiling—McCarthy was an avid polo player; see the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills hotel—next to Renaissance canvasses and even a blue, eighteenth-century sedan chair in the foyer, which sported a telephone within its recesses.

In the basement were all McCarthy's files and contracts of the day. You could pull open a drawer and see how much Vilma Bánky was getting. Or Rod La Rocque. Or Valentino. I felt a little like Joe Gillis. All I needed was the
Salome
script to work on. At least Al's pool had water in it, not rats.

The trip to Al's was an amusing break in an otherwise bleak and uninteresting time. The strike squelched everything. You were not allowed to write scripts. Just when I was getting started, too.

“Well, since you can't write screenplays,” Kelly pointed out, washing the dishes as I dried, “now you've got ample time to write that novel you're always talking about.” Ah, yes . . .

THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION

That novel. As
though I needed to bash my head against the brick wall of fiction one more time.

But the truth was that because of the Writers Guild strike, I had nothing better to do—at least when I wasn't literally walking around in circles on the picket line—so I started banging away at my long-gestating notion of a Doyle pastiche in which Sherlock Holmes met, matched wits with, and finally collaborated with Dr. Sigmund Freud. Freud cures Holmes's cocaine addiction; in return, Holmes's methodology sets Freud on the analytic path that will lead to psychoanalysis.

What became
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
was the end result of many thoughts and influences converging. My long-standing fondness for the Holmes stories was, of course, the starting point. (In my early teens I had actually attempted to turn Holmes into a musical.) But it must also be said that my distaste for all the Holmes movies and other imitations played an almost equally important part. In a word, I have never seen a Holmes movie I didn't dislike; almost never read a Holmes pastiche (other than a couple of very early ones) that seemed to me to capture the essence of Holmes and his amanuensis. Holmes pastiches, in whatever medium, always emerge as campy and unreal, in stark contrast—to me, anyway—with the original stories. It's the difference between a live Bengal tiger and the taxidermic version. In most of these stuffed approximations, Watson is always depicted as an idiot, an admittedly tempting choice because it's so easy, but one that, on closer examination, makes no sense. Why would a genius choose to hang out with a buffoon? How can we reconcile bumbling Nigel Bruce as the bluff but reliable narrator of the original case histories? Holmes's vanity is a subtle thing: he wants the appreciation of a regular man, not a sub-regular man. At least part of my impetus, therefore, was this disgust with what I regarded as inferior imitation. I felt—innately
felt
—that I understood these characters, their nuances, and Doyle's narrative tone better than anyone else. Right or wrong, that notion helped goad me to the project.

Another catalyst was a question repeatedly asked when I was in high school, viz: Your old man's a shrink, right? Is he a Freudian? I had no idea (how would I?) and finally asked him outright, “Pop, are you a Freudian?”

“It's a silly question,” he responded.

When I asked why it was a silly question, he pondered and then said, “Because it is no more possible to discuss the history of psychoanalysis without starting with Freud than it is possible to discuss the history of America without mention of Columbus—or the Vikings. But to suppose that nothing has happened since the Vikings is to be pretty rigid, pretty doctrinaire. When a patient comes to see me, I listen to what they say, I listen to how they say it; I am especially interested in what they do not say. In addition, I look at their body language, how they dress, whether they tend to show up on time . . . I am in short, searching for clues—from them—as to why they are not happy. And against this data, I apply some measure of clinical experience to interpret these clues.” I interrupted to observe that this sounded rather like detective work. “Very like detective work,” he conceded, and at that instant, I realized who my childhood hero, Sherlock Holmes, had always reminded me of: my father. From there, I fell to wondering how much Arthur Conan Doyle had known about the life and work of Sigmund Freud.

The answers were surprising. Doyle and Freud were essentially contemporaries, dying within nine years of each other in London, Doyle in 1930, Freud in 1939. Both were doctors; in fact Doyle had spent six months in Vienna (Freud's home) studying ophthalmology. Enticingly, Freud's first paper extolling the virtues of cocaine as an anesthetic during eye surgery had been written in collaboration with two eye doctors, Koenigstein and Koeller.

Cocaine. That was the real connection. Doyle probably never used the stuff—although it was not then illegal—but in making Holmes a cocaine fiend, he was treading in (pre-Freudian) Freudian waters.

Back in New York when I had first begun thinking about these coincidences, what I had contemplated was a nonfiction piece of research on the subject of Doyle and Freud, but I'm hopeless without a story. By the time of the Guild strike, years later, the book had pretty much taken shape in my mind as a Holmes pastiche.

A Holmes pastiche must play by its own set of rules, the main one being that you write as Watson and imagine the Holmes stories to be true. Doyle is relegated to the subordinate status of Watson's “literary agent.” Under this umbrella there is room for all sorts of playful speculation. Resolving Watson's hilarious inconsistencies—was he wounded in the arm or leg during the Battle of Maiwand in the second Afghan war? was the landlady's name Mrs. Hudson or Mrs. Turner?—you can take on Holmes and women; Holmes and music; Moriarty and Higher Math; the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus, and on and on. There are at least two full-length biographies of Holmes, one of Watson, and even one of the landlady, for chrissake. There's a series of novels about Professor Moriarty; another series about Irene Adler, “The Woman.” Walk down Baker Street in London and see plaques everywhere claiming to be the original of 221B, the most famous address in the world. At the time of this writing there are not one but two—count 'em,
two
!—annotated editions of the complete Sherlock Holmes.

Of course no one I knew personally was interested in this stuff, besides me. They weren't interested in Sherlock so how could they begin to be amused by what I was finding hilarious?

Once I got to work I quickly discovered that banging away—which is to say using my trusty Smith Corona—didn't work when trying to write like Arthur Conan Doyle. The typewriter encouraged a different sort of rhythm. I found I had to write the thing longhand, at least for the first draft. It was an interesting experience, getting tactile with the twirling tails of
R
's, furiously dotting
I
's, and slashing the crosses on
T
's.

When I had finished, I felt that at the very least I had finally written something publishable. The question was how to go about it.

For starters I sent the manuscript back to the East Coast of IFA and asked their literary agents to read it. After what seemed an eternity, a well-known book agent got back to me.

“There's no point in my reading this,” she advised me. “I've never read any Sherlock Holmes, so how could I tell if this was any good?”

As was typical of me at the time, I said what I thought: “Putting aside the astonishing fact that you're a literary agent and have never read any Holmes, I'd have to say that if this book depends on your knowing any other book, it's a flop already.”

An excellent argument, you might say, except that she'd hung up before she could hear it. Always making friends and influencing people.

I thought about my dilemma. I knew one person in the publishing business, Jim Nederland, whom I had met when he was the editor of a novel by my old professor, Peter Arnott. Nederland was at Macmillan.

I tucked the manuscript into a suitcase and splurged on a ticket to New York. When I reached the city it was pissing rain and Nederland didn't work at Macmillan anymore.

A reasonable person would have called first. It never occurred to me that people moved from job to job in the real world. My father was a doctor; he stayed a doctor.

“Is he still in the publishing business?” I asked the puzzled receptionist at Macmillan as I dripped a large pool of rainwater before her fancy desk.

She rather thought he was and gave me the directions to another publisher, across town.

By the time I reached Hawthorne Books, I was sopping wet. Nederland was surprised to see me.

“What brings you here?” he wondered, helping me off with my wet things.

“I've written a novel,” I explained brightly.

“Oh.” I studied him as he gingerly hung up my coat. The “oh” was oh so-studiously neutral.

“What do you mean, ‘Oh'?”

He shrugged. “This is a nonfiction house,” he explained. “I've tried to get five novels accepted here—they've all been turned down.”

My turn.

“Oh.” I had a cup of coffee in his office while I collected my thoughts, then rose and said, “Look, I'm leaving this book with you anyway. Frankly, I don't have any choice; I don't know anyone else in the business.”

“I understand.” He walked me to the elevator, and I got on the plane and flew back to Los Angeles. Win some, lose some.

I was pretty surprised when four or five days later I got an excited phone call from Nederland.

“This one they'll publish.”

“Really?”

“Really. Wonderful fun.”

Wonderful fun. Wow. Lemme think.

“Uh, Jim, let me, uh, let me think about this.”

“We'll offer you six thousand dollars for it.”

Wow. That made two wows in a row.

“I, uh, need to figure some stuff out here . . .”

“Don't keep me on tenterhooks.”

“I'll try not to.”

I hung up, rather stunned, and explained matters to Kelly.

“Now what do I do?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean I'm damned if IFA is going to collect ten percent from a deal they didn't lift a finger to help, but I need someone who knows about this stuff.”

“Good point.” We thought about it some more.

“Why don't you give it to Tom and ask his advice?” Kelly suggested.

“Good idea.”

In theory, Tom was my lawyer, a guy I'd met at a party somewhere who was in entertainment law. He said he'd be my lawyer if I ever needed one but I never had. You have to be halfway successful to need a lawyer. It was a year since we'd met. I hoped he remembered me.

I called him at his law firm and explained the situation to him. He was intrigued.

“Who's Hawthorne? And let me see your book,” he added.