Written Interview: Terry Southern
From the Paris Review:
At the time of this interview (1967), Southern was famous as the coauthor of Candy, the best-selling sex novel, and as the screenwriter behind Stanley Kubrick’s dark antiwar, antinuke comedy, Dr. Strangelove. Both appeared in the U.S. in 1964 (a headline in Life magazine read “Terry Southern vs. Smugness”). By 1967 he could be spotted on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, standing between Dylan Thomas and Dion. Gore Vidal called him “the most profoundly witty writer of our generation.” Lenny Bruce blurbed his books.
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After the interview was transcribed, a copy was given to Southern (according to Paris Review custom) for him to revise as he saw fit. He never gave it back. Every so often I would ask him, on my own or at the prompting of George Plimpton, when the interview would be ready. “I’m working on it,” he would say. “It’s got to be tight and bright.” After a year or two, Plimpton stopped asking; I continued to question Southern about it but less and less frequently. When Southern died in 1995, his long-time companion, Gail Gerber, said to me, as a consolation of sorts, “Well, at least now that interview can come out.” But the interview — complete with Southern’s clarifications and emendations — got lost in a pile of papers. It emerged without its title page and fell into the hands of a Ph.D. student, who mistakenly attributed it to the biographer Albert Goldman. Since then, short excerpts have appeared, always under Goldman’s name. Thanks to the steadfast and remedial efforts of Southern’s son, Nile, the finished text is available here for the first time.
An excerpt:
INTERVIEWER: When and how did you decide to be a writer?
SOUTHERN: I never “decided” to be a writer. I used to write a lot, then show it to my friends — one or two of them anyway — with the idea, more or less, of astonishing or confounding them with the content of the pages. I knew they had never seen anything like this before — I mean, the weirdest thing they could possibly have read before was Poe or one of those little cartoon fuck-books, as they were called, whereas my stuff was much weirder and more immediate. I used the names of teachers, classmates, et cetera. These productions were well received by the two or three people — no girls — who read them, but finally I went too far and alienated one of the readers, my best friend, by using his sister in a really imaginative piece, perhaps the best of this period. That slowed me down for a while, in daring, but finally I learned not to care too much and would write wholly for an imaginary reader whose tastes were similar to my own.
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INTERVIEWER: Was writing movies something you always wanted to do?
SOUTHERN: Yes, but there was never any possibility of it. They just weren’t making movies I could have worked on. I did get a letter one time from Jerry Wald, saying, “I have read your story in Harper’s Bazaar, and I think you have a very good cinematic quality, would you be interested in writing for the screen,” and blah blah blah. And then it went on to say, “Too many serious writers dismiss the potential of the screen as commercial, however may I point out to you that only recently such outstanding literary personages as Mr. William Faulkner,” and so on.
I showed this letter to a friend of mine, Harold Meeske, who said, “Don’t even answer the letter. The thing to do is to write a screenplay and send it back, like, ‘Am I interested? Dig this!’ ” I said, “Okay, what’s the story?” and he said, “I’ve got it. This friend of mine is just coming out of Sing Sing. America’s number-one jewel thief. He’s getting out Friday, and we’ll write a script based on his adventures. His name” — well, we’d better leave out his name. He’s making it in Hollywood now, as a screenwriter.
Anyway, he comes to Harold and Marilyn Meeske’s. So there was this guy, America’s number-one jewel thief, and he moved in with them, and I moved in with them, and the four of us worked on this screenplay, and then we sent it in to Jerry Wald. No response. Nothing. Later I found out that this letter I’d gotten, although it wasn’t mimeographed, was in fact a form letter he had sent, you know, to Herbert Gold and Philip Roth — everybody got one of these letters. That was my first brush with the Film Capital.
And this is, of course, is the only way to work well.
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INTERVIEWER: Even as co-director, wouldn’t you need experience working with actors?
SOUTHERN: I get along very well with actors. They’re like children. They need to be encouraged and reprimanded enough to know that you’re interested. You’d think that great actors, like George C. Scott or Laurence Olivier, would resent direction, but they all depend on it. They’ve got to have the attention — it’s like dope — but at the same time the attention has to be convincing, it has to be something that they can acknowledge as real attention, and they get pretty discriminating, because they get lots of broadside, blind attention. That’s the thing. If you give them that, you can enchant them into anything.
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