Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine. Roger L. Simon
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This was not what they had learned in school.
Of course, the secret to my thrillers was that I stayed as close as possible to the zeitgeist. Indeed, that was easy, because the impulse to make an impact on the affairs of the day was what propelled my desire to do the Moses Wine series in the first place. In a way, it was my first, bizarre entry into blogging—blogging with a plot, you might call it. The Big Fix, as an example, was written at the height of the McGovern campaign of 1972, for which I was walking precinct. I simply turned the bland peacenik McGovern into the bland peacenik Miles Hawthorne and changed the background from a presidential to a California senatorial campaign. (Ah, fiction!) For the mystery premise, I had Hawthorne (McGovern) being smeared, his campaign endangered, by the backing of Howard Eppis—an Abbie Hoffman-style renegade who was making statements to the effect that Hawthorne was the man finally to bring the dreamedof revolution to capitalist America.
Moses Wine was brought into the case to find this Eppis, if indeed it really was Eppis, by his old Berkeley girlfriend Lila Shea, now a Hawthorne campaign worker. (“The last time I saw Lila Shea,” it began, “we were making love in the back of a Chevy hearse across from the Oakland Induction Center. Tear gas was going off in our ears…. etc.”) My Moses doesn’t care much for Hawthorne (too middle-of-the-road), but Lila is killed not long after they see each other again and he takes the case to avenge her death. Classic detective stuff, with a Sixties spin.
I had no idea how well it was going to work. I was just having fun. Partly for that reason, I brought in the character of Aunt Sonya—a wiseacre Jewish great aunt with a socialist-anarchist background straight out of the Yiddishe bund—as a kind of sidekick and conscience to Moses not to stray from the radical line. (In the movie version, she joked about her romantic relations with Bakunin. “He was a very good dancer,” she said.) I never had such an aunt, but in those days I think I wished I had. I came from that Jewish-WASP background and to me the old socialists, closer to my wife Dyanne’s family but still distant even from them, were warmer, more authentic people, haymishe in the Yiddish expression.
When I look at this from a contemporary perspective, my move toward neoconservative politics stems, in part, anyway, from a similar impulse. I wanted to join those former Trotskyites—the Podhoretzes and the Kristols—in what I imagined to be their haymishe pro-democracy world. Of course, I never would have conceived of this odyssey when writing The Big Fix. In those days I worried whether I was radical enough. Was I a sell-out, taking advantage of my lefty friends and connections? Ironically, years later, when I became a friend of John Podhoretz, the scion of the neocon family and his father’s successor as the editor of Commentary, he told me that the Moses Wine books were the only left-wing literature of our generation that he could stand. He identified with the character, and with his humor, in spite of himself.
Even before it was published, The Big Fix was given a boost by Ross Macdonald (the pen name of Kenneth Millar) who was then the dean of American detective fiction and on the cover of Newsweek. Phillip Handler, a professor of mine at Dartmouth, had passed the manuscript to a friend of his who was friends with Millar/Macdonald. I was in awe of Macdonald, preferring his work even to Chandler and Hammett’s for its more intellectually complex Freudian underpinnings. I assumed that he wouldn’t be impressed with my pastiche. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only did he admire my work, he gave it the most extraordinary send-off imaginable, calling it a revolution in the field. I haven’t had a comparable experience in my professional life to when I first opened that letter from Ken, not even the day I found out I was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay of Enemies: A Love Story. The Big Fix, after all, was all mine; Moses Wine was all mine. And I knew that, with his backing, it would be noticed.
Several weeks later I drove up to meet Millar at his home in Santa Barbara. When I arrived, he was waiting in the courtyard of the El Patio Mexican Restaurant wearing a black Borsalino. I was wearing a similar hat, signature apparel for detective writers, as if we’d modeled ourselves on film noir characters and belonged to the famous LAPD Hat Squad circa 1940. Millar greeted me like an old friend. Of all the writers I’ve ever met, Ken was the most generous with his colleagues. Unlike the many authors who denigrate their competition, sometimes viciously, he made an effort to encourage young talent and even to buck up older veterans after years of failure.
I saw this often at that El Patio Restaurant, where I’d go every month for the writers’ lunch grouped around Ken. The pain he’d endured in his personal life made this generosity of spirit all the more impressive. (He and author Margaret Millar’s only child was a disturbed young woman who, like one of the disappearing children in Ken’s own novels, ran away from home and spent time in Camarillo State Mental Hospital before dying of a brain hemorrhage at thirty-one.) There was a nobility to the man similar to the honorable knight critics and readers found in his protagonist Lew Archer. I didn’t quite realize it then, but when Ken wrote of my work that I was “the most brilliant new writer of private detective fiction who has emerged in some years” and that “The Big Fix, like The Big Sleep, should become something of a landmark in its field,” he was giving me a gift that would ensure the book’s success with good reviews, foreign translations, and literary prizes.
Those prizes included that year’s Best First Mystery from the Crime Writers of Great Britain, a group traditionally unfriendly to American authors. Hugely flattered, I flew to London for the awards banquet. Also in attendance was my actor friend Richard Dreyfuss, who, after many ups and downs, would play Moses Wine in The Big Fix movie six years later.
Richard, who had just made his first sensation at twenty-four in American Graffiti, was in London playing the lead in an art film. He sat in the back of the banquet room, calling attention to himself by breaking in on the proceedings sotto voce. The fusty British authors on the dais were clearly put off, and I was embarrassed. Richard was there at my behest. Soon enough, the self-aggrandizement was mercifully over and I accepted the award from Dick Francis, the dean of British crime writers and the author of dozens of horse racing mysteries. I remember that he introduced me as a soon-to-be “old lag,” British parlance for someone who writes workmanlike thrillers year after year and then goes to his grave. Was this what I wanted to be? The room seemed to be full of them. I had more interest in Dreyfuss, despite his narcissistic outbursts and even though I knew that dealing with movie stars like him would be complicated at best.
What I didn’t realize is that years later Richard and I—then comrades, as he came from a socialist background—would be on differing sides politically, although in Richard’s case those differences would be nuanced. Unlike like many actors, he was an intelligent man who actually read books before he spouted off. But what I was watching back then in London was a need for the limelight under any circumstances—a need that almost always carries through for actors. In those days, this wasn’t a problem for me, because many of those actors identified with Moses Wine, wanted to be seen as the “hero of the people,” especially if that hero was a private dick who acted heroically and got the girls.
Of course, not everyone liked The Big Fix. I got my biggest pushback from those “girls,” more specifically “women,” because the book was published in 1973, when the Women’s Liberation Movement was sweeping the intelligentsia. It had hit my own household with a vengeance. Dyanne was a founding member of one of the first women’s consciousness-raising groups in LA, probably in the country. Most members of the group were in the media and film—among them journalist Marcia Seligson, filmmaker Lynne Littman (who made the 1983 anti-nuke melodrama Testament), and graphic artist Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, who helped establish the Women’s Building in downtown Los Angeles. They met weekly in one of the women’s homes, including ours, and I remember listening to their conversations from the second floor balcony, a male spy on the women’s movement, nervous that I’d fall off and make a spectacle of myself.
Some of these consciousness-raising discussions were earnest and theoretical, but the more interesting ones contained personal gossip about the women themselves and the men in their lives—who was sleeping with whom, who was a male chauvinist pig or a philanderer, and what the women themselves were up to. And everyone was up to a lot. This was the era when sexual liberation was in the air and monogamy challenged as a form of male oppression or just old-fashioned