This got more intense when a men’s consciousness-raising group was formed as a rejoinder to the women’s group, in a fit of what might be described as vagina envy. If the women could get together and dish, the men could, too—so long as they couched it in the self-abnegating rhetoric of the era. Along with me in this partly self-lacerating but superficially political endeavor was a similar group of young and ambitious LA artsy types, including the soon-to-be directors Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious) and Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman, married then to Lynne Littman in the women’s group, now to Helen Mirren), architect Peter de Bretteville (married to Sheila Levrant de Bretteville), the photographer Ben Lifson (married to poetess Martha Lifson in the women’s group), painter Lance Richbourg, and lawyer Tom Pollack, who was then the attorney of wunderkind George Lucas and one day would be the head of Universal Studios. We seemed to be a high-powered cabal in the making, paying ritual obeisance to breaking the shackles of male chauvinism.
Well, not completely. What soon evolved is that Ben Lifson was having an open affair (open to us, anyway) with the girlfriend of one of the youngest men in our group. His name was Steve—I can’t remember his surname, but that’s just as well—and he happened to be a photography student of Lifson’s at Cal Arts. This was all a subject of constant men’s group discussion. “Open marriage” was trendy then and we had before us a living, breathing example of it. Within a few weeks, however, all theory was going out the window as the sordidness of the reality set in. Members of the group justifiably grew to hate Ben and to pity the pathetic Steve. I say pathetic because he went along with this without doing the natural thing—kicking Ben in the balls—while justifying his inaction in the now comical ideological rhetoric of the period.
Against this background I began to conceive Wild Turkey, the second Moses Wine novel, which was deliberately more comic than its predecessor. People had told me The Big Fix was funny. That was news to me, but I accepted it, nodding as if the humor was intentional. It may be that the best comedy is unintentional—it’s simply the honest observation of reality. But for the next book, I decided to be more overt about it.
At the beginning of the new novel, Moses—who’d become a minor celebrity from his Big Fix adventure—is burst in on at three in the morning by Dr. Gunther Thomas, a not very well disguised version of Hunter Thompson, the ‘gonzo’ journalist and author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Dr. Thomas wants to do a profile of the “hippie Sam Spade” for Rolling Stone. He’s even got a case for Wine. The best-selling author Jock Hecht—a Norman Mailer-type who has written a notorious book on sexual freedom—is wanted for the murder of the anchorwoman on a TV morning news program. He needs someone to help get him off. Trouble is, Moses’s “ex” is in India with her guru and has left him with their young kids, one of who is still in diapers (the Women’s Lib angle!) and constantly in need of a change. Undeterred, Dr. Gunther Thomas grabs Moses and the kids, and off we go.
The plot, as it is with these stories, is intentionally convoluted, but suffice it to say that Jock Hecht himself is murdered in short order. Moses is hired by Jock’s attractive widow, Nancy, who reveals (shades of the men’s consciousness group) that she and Jock had had an open marriage. It had been Jock’s idea, with Nancy going along grudgingly. She and Moses are kindred spirits in that regard. They both recoil from open marriage, but feel guilty or a little square or a combination of the two for being so conventional. Naturally, they fall for each other, but due to the conventions of the genre, their romance is not to be.
Reflecting on this today, with the perspective of over three decades, it’s hard to believe that we were all so naïve about marriage. (It’s not hard to believe, however, that this story attracted Warren Beatty—but more on that later.) Basing human relationships on ideology is almost comically absurd and most often a convenient lie. But I did enjoy writing—and, yes, I admit, to researching—the scenes set at a sexual freedom “institute” in Topanga Canyon—the same one (Sandstone) that had been the basis for Gay Talese’s notorious “new journalist” studies of American mores.
It’s fair to ask me whether I participated personally in the “open marriage” experiment of the time. To be honest, I didn’t have the guts, even if I wanted to—and I didn’t want to, in the end. But that didn’t mean I was honest with my spouse or she with me. Perhaps influenced by the temper of the times, or just by our own characters, we did cheat on each other. As the Wine books and, consequently, my movie career, were mushrooming, my wife and one of my best friends—both of whom were writers, but frustrated in their careers—were having a long and involved affair. Of course, envy wasn’t their only motivation. I was plenty to blame myself. But by the Eighties, my marriage with Dyanne Asimow, from which we had two beautiful children, was dead. I was on my way as a grown man to live out the experiences most have as a teenager or young adult. I would be married again, this time for only a short while, and then have numerous relationships—sometimes telling myself it was for art—before winding up married a third time, happily and permanently. In a way, the Wine books can be looked upon as a hidden journal of my three marriages and those relationships.
All this was life imitating art imitating life imitating …For a while I was too busy living this out to write the book, so my editor Alan Rinzler, anxious to get a sequel published, invited me up to San Francisco to finish it. He locked me in the same room at the Seal Rock Inn where Hunter Thompson had just completed his latest book for Straight Arrow. We shared the same cleaning lady, who would come into the room while I banged away on my Selectric, look into the bathroom, and say, shaking her head, “Mr. Thompson—he had so many pills in that cabinet.” No doubt.
The only other visitor I had was Alan, who showed up early each evening for the pages (I was trying to knock out about ten per day), peruse them, and then work with me on where the next part of the story was headed. This reminded me of the way Hollywood “scribes” were said to have worked in the Thirties and Forties, passing the pages under the door to cigar-chomping producers. (Alan smoked joints incessantly.) One result of having an editor with me on a daily basis may have been that Wild Turkey (named for the bourbon swilled by the Hunter Thompson character) has the most carefully wrought plot of any of my books. I know this because it was so easy to adapt into a screenplay. I have personally worked on a film version of three of my books—The Big Fix, The Straight Man, and Wild Turkey—and Turkey worked most perfectly because of its tight plotting, an indispensable element of good screenwriting. At one point I expected Wild Turkey to be completed first, even though The Big Fix was the earlier book and had been under option already.
When The Big Fix came out, there was an immediate flutter of Hollywood attention. Mike Gruskoff, a classic movie producer with roots in the garment business, took the book to Twentieth Century Fox and the studio optioned it for the hot new director of the time—Martin Scorsese. I’d seen his groundbreaking Mean Streets, which I considered the best film by a new American director in years, and was thrilled. How could this be happening to me?
Well, it didn’t. I met with Marty, who seemed standoffish—curious, considering that he’d signed up to direct. After a few weeks he drifted out of contact. It turned out that something better—in his eyes, at least—had come up; he was off directing Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore with Ellen Burstyn. Gruskoff and I were left on our own. He suggested another director—a kid named Steven Spielberg who’d just made a television movie (Duel) everybody liked. He was supposedly interested in my book. I scoffed. How could this person, younger than I was by two or three years and a television (snort!) director to boot, understand the political nuances of my revolutionary novel? I remember having several arguments about this with Gruskoff, who—for some misguided reason—thought that I was being belligerent and selfish. What’d he know? He was a dumb producer from the schmatta business, no less. Besides, in my heart of hearts, I thought I should direct the movie. Who was this Spielberg? Soon enough, Stephen had drifted away as well, leaving Mike and me to develop the script on our own. It was never made. Within two years, Spielberg had directed both Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Looking back, I think I must have been an arrogant idiot to pass up what could have been a life-changing opportunity. (It