‘Your future is in Hollywood. I can make you the next Bela Lugosi,’ said James Toback, looking me straight in the eye. Jimmy Toback is a hell of a fellow. An obsessive with an encyclopedic knowledge of sport and other data, he directed such great films as The Gambler, Fingers (it made Harvey Keitel into a star), wrote the screenplay for Bugsy, and has just wrapped Seduced and Abandoned, starring Taki and Alec Baldwin, not necessarily in that order. S&A is going to Sundance and our hopes are high. Jimmy says that I came out fine, ‘the only man in Cannes among the movie crowd with some dignity’. A bit like calling someone an intellectual because his bookcase is bigger than his TV.
Jimmy was a tennis player before he became a film director. He came up against Arthur Ashe at a junior tournament and broke Arthur’s serve right away and held his own. Then Jimmy dropped 12 games in a row. Shaking hands at the net, he asked the 1975 Wimbledon champ if he was worried when down two love. ‘Not at all,’ said Ashe. Jimmy decided the movies were his future. Talking tennis at the Norman Mailer awards last week, I told him about having played Dick Raskind twice, beating him on clay and losing to him on cement, as hard courts were called back then. Raskind was an ophthalmologist who went to Yale and then played
on the circuit for a while. He then changed sex and played under the name Renée
Richards. ‘He did it for the rankings,’ said Jimmy.
Toback has lost a fortune on the green tables but, as I said, he’s a walking encyclopedia and when he enters a room his presence turns it into a crowded cocktail party. At the Norman Mailer Centre’s annual awards he held court about Seduced and Abandoned, tennis, the coming elections, underwater explorations of Nigerian lakes, why Brits drink — he was once married to Mimi Russell, the Duke of Marlborough’s niece — the insatiable appetite of modern celebs for the limelight, and other such matters, including the reasons why young girls go to bed with older men.
I take a table every year with Michael Mailer, who produced Seduced and Abandoned, and this time there was a bonus. Oliver Stone and I made up after 35 years of sniping at each other. ‘I’ve finally seen the light,’ I told him, ‘and I’m now a pacifist without even being bisexual.’ He burst out laughing and invited me to the Boom Boom room downtown. What would Norman Mailer have made of a black-tie gala at a fancy hotel in his name? One never knew with Norman, but he most likely would have loved it. All of his nine children were there, and writers such as Gay Talese, Garrison Keillor, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Caro and others got up on stage and regaled us with Mailer stories. Alec Baldwin was the master of ceremonies and did a hell of a job moving things along and at a fast pace. I sat there drinking and asking Mrs James Toback why attractive nice women always marry bad boys.
The Mailer Centre supports and celebrates writers, and provides monetary and educational support to early- and mid-career scribes. Most of the speeches had to do with good writing. A hard thing to find in today’s visual and texting culture. The trouble with writing in America today is, according to the greatest Greek writer since Homer, that it confuses literature with spectacle. Publicity does to literary talent what the Sirens did to old Odysseus. To his crew, rather. We need an Odysseus to blindfold the writer and plug up his or her ears and keep the hucksters out. The schmoozers and their ilk. What amazes me is the number of existing rubbish writers who are apotheosised by critics for breaking all rules of good writing, and then some. Being nimble and pithy is one thing, writing incomprehensible lazy short sentences is another.
Back before good clear writing became redundant, the enemy was breathy, inflated prose. It was called purple, but I’ll take purple long before I take magic realism and other such gimmicks. Yes, we had preposterously melodramatic plots and all that, but at least one knew where the protagonist was and whom he was following. No longer. Now only crime writers are worth reading for their prose. My heroes are, of course, James Cain and Raymond Chandler, but Dashiell Hammett will also do nicely.
Last week, nursing the Mailer evening hangover, I looked over a terrible newspaper that spreads questionable news daily and is called the Big Bagel Times. And was enchanted by reading the following: ‘Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin’s feet were placed in a tub of cement.’ It was a review by Janet Maslin of a Dennis Lehane crime noir called Live by Night. Can you see the genius in it? What an opening sentence! It’s full of foreshadowing, mystery and terror. And it gets better: ‘Almost everything of note that had ever happened in his life…had been set in motion the morning he first crossed paths with Emma Gould.’ Now that’s what I call writing, and I thank Janet Maslin for pointing it out, even if she did it in such a propaganda sheet as the Times. Salman Rushdie would have handled it differently: ‘A tub of cement and the Gulf of Mexico crossed in front of Emma and he sank.’ Or something like that.
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