CHARLES PORTIS: THE TELEGRAPH OBITUARY

My obituary of Charles Portis is in today's Daily Telegraph; it's also up online, and you can link to it here, though it is behind a paywall. There is no byline on Telegraph obits, and though what appears is pretty much what I wrote, for reasons of space a lot of detail was cut. And there was at least one reference that was not mine: when it calls the first movie of True Grit "corny". It may feature John Wayne having fun with himself, and some overly severe acting, but even in state it is too dark to be called corny. So here is what I originally filed, and I am grateful to the paper for sticking with Portis and eventually finding him some space....

 CHARLES PORTIS, novelist

Charles Portis, who has died aged 86, was, in the oft-repeated words of critic Ron Rosenbaum, America's 'least-known great novelist'. At least he was before his cult following of the good and the great got his five novels back into print, appropriately enough from former Penguin editor Peter Mayer's Overlook Press. Portis' literary low-profile was partly due to his low output and his reluctance to self-promote (though he was hardly a recluse, as he was often described), but mostly because his claim to fame happened to be a western, and worse, one made into a movie starring John Wayne.

Yet when True Grit appeared, Roald Dahl, in a rare book review, called it 'the best novel to come my way for a very long time...he hasn't put a foot wrong anywhere. What a writer.'

True Grit is the story of 14 year old Mattie Ross who, seeking to avenge the murder of her rancher father, hires hard-drinking deputy US Marshal Rooster Cogburn to track him down. Like all Portis' novels, it is a journey, peppered with eccentric characters, and stands its frequent comparison with one of the greatest American novels, Huckleberry Finn. Like Twain, Portis' eye for America's ingrained absurdities is presented almost as reportage. But like Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, True Grit is a recollection, with a now-elderly Mattie providing prickly, unreliable narration. Her aged Arkansas voice is pitch-perfect, which Portis once attributed to his time working on a paper in his college days, editing local reports by the Arkansas town ladies who filed in longhand.

Charles McColl Portis was born, appropriately enough for someone whose fiction was a series of quests, in El Dorado, Arkansas, 28 December 1933. His father Samuel came to El Dorado during an oil boom, where he met and married Alice Waddle. He began teaching, and his mother wrote for local papers. Portis grew up in a series of southern Arkansas towns, and after finishing high school, enlisted in the Marines and fought in the Korean War. Discharged a sergeant, he took a journalism degree from the University of Arkansas, working on the college paper, the Traveler, and the Northwest Arkansas Times. His first job was at the Memphis Commerical-Appeal, followed by two years with the Arkansas Gazette, where his work got him hired by the New York Herald-Tribune. At the Tribune his coverage of the civil rights movement across the South was so impressive that in 1963 he became their bureau chief in London.

Although he was considered one of the stars among a group of reporters at the Trib who went on to define 'new journalism', after a year in London he quit to return to a lake-side cabin in Arkansas and write fiction. Two years later, in 1966, his first novel, Norwood, was published after being serialised in The Saturday Evening Post. In it, Arkansas-born ex-Marine Norwood Pratt returns from Vietnam determined to become a famous singer, and is conned by Grady Fring the Kredit King into moving cars to New York, encountering a cast of eccentrics along the way, including Joann The Wonder Hen, a college-educated chicken.

True Grit was published two years later, its episodic journey again perfect for the Post's serialisation. After the film's success, Kim Darby (who played Mattie) and Glen Campbell were reunited alongside gridiron star Joe Namath in a friendly but flat movie version of Norwood, which was stolen by actresses Tish Sterling and Carol Lynley in smaller parts. Portis briefly tried script-doctoring in Los Angeles, but returned to Arkansas and his writing career, best summed up by his famous new journalism colleague Tom Wolfe in his usual flamboyant style: 'He made a fortune...A fishing shack! In Arkansas!...It was too goddamned perfect to be true”

It took 11 years before Portis' third novel, many people's cult favourite, The Dog Of The South appeared. Dreamy innocent Ray Midge heads south from Arkansas to track down his runaway wife, her lover Dupree, himself is being sought for writing letters threatening the president, and, most crucially, his Ford Torino car. His con-man is Dr Reo Symes, literally a snake-oil salesman, who himself is searching for the mysterious John Selmer Dix, author of inspirational self-help books for salesmen. Portis was hugely well-read, and it is not unreasonable to draw comparisons with another of America's greatest neglected novels, Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, with its panoply of hopeful, deluded Americans being taken for rides. The trick was the way Portis reported their sometimes surreal stories with straight-faced seriousness, in voices that resonated authenticity. As Portis scholar Carlos Rotella put it, 'when my 9-year-old daughter turned over a straight that beat my two pair and said “Shot by a child!” I knew that reading True Grit to my kids had been a good idea.'

Portis' next novel followed only six years later. Masters Of Atlantis (1985) begins in 1917, when an American doughboy, Lamar Jimmerman, is handed a manuscript by a London beggar. The Codex Pappus leads him to the secret Gnomon Society and an Englishman called Sir Sydney Hen with whom he creates a religion, which attracts an American con-man preacher, Austin Popper. It reads like a slapstick combination of Thomas Pynchon's V and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. Six years after that came Gringos (1991), in which another ex-Marine, Jimmy Burns, sells illegal antiquities in a dangerous Mexico almost as strange as Portis' America.

In 2010 the Coen Brothers remade True Grit, which propelled Portis back into the public eye, and in 2012 a miscellany of his shorter writing, Escape Velocity, was published. That year also saw Portis diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In 2014, he was honoured at a Gala at the governor's mansion in Little Rock, but he was unable to attend. In a moment of pure Portis fiction, the keynote speaker, journalist Ray Reed, sent his last-minute regrets, because the headlights of his car weren't working. Portis died 17 February 2020, in a Little Rock hospice, survived by his brother Jonathan. In Gringos, Jimmy Burns muses that 'none of us, not even the high-jumper slithering over his crossbar, ever gets very far off the earth. And yet we come down hard.' He never married and leaves no survivors.

REMEMBERING TY HARDIN

While wandering around 1880 Town in Midland, South Dakota today, I came across a copy of the famous photo of the Warner Bros.' TV western stars drawing their pistols. What made this one special was that it was autographed by Ty Hardin, who at that point was playing Bronco Layne in a series that had originally been a replacement for Cheyenne, when WB had contract trouble with Clint Walker, and now was rotating through schedule spots with Cheyenne and Will Hutchins' Sugarfoot.

But it reminded me that Hardin died last week, and I wanted to write something then, so it's a good excuse to say a couple of things about him now. One thing I hadn't known was that he was a football player. His obits said he got a scholarship to Blinn Junior College, then attended Dallas Bible Institute before joining the Army. Then he enrolled at Texas A&M and, so the story goes, played for Bear Bryant there. It's hard to check, because he didn't graduate, but the stories I read said he played tight end, in the days before that was a position. He registers no stats as a receiver from 1954-56, when A&M had John David Crow, Bobby Joe Conrad, and Jack Pardee. I did find a picture of him in a football uniform, but I don't know who's it was and he looks younger than a post-Army Ty Hungerford.

What I did know a bit about was how fragile his career was. It resembles, in some ways, Clint Eastwood's early career, except that Hardin made a couple of bad decisions, whereas Clint made a couple of good ones. But they got into TV by luck, more or less. Both were hired originally because of their good looks, as beefcake. Clint was one of the last of Universal's apprentices, and he had been trying to get into acting. Hardin (or Orison Whipple Hungerford, Jr. as he then was named, though Ty was his family nickname) was spotted by a Paramount scout at a costume party (he was a cowboy) and was signed to a contract. He had bit parts in a couple of films, including Last Train To Gun Hill, billed as Ty Hungerford, when, like Clint, he got lucky and landed a TV gig.

Hardin met John Wayne, and  when he tried to get the Ricky Nelson part in Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo. Wayne introduced him to Hawks, who was with William Orr of Warners. Hawks didn't give him the part, but Orr soon bought his contract. Warners changed his name to Hardin, gave him acting lessons, and introduced him into the Cheyenne series as Cheyenne's cousin. He was an instant hit, and Bronco ran for four years. His best film part was in Merrill's Marauders, and it looked like he was on his way. After Warners, he was getting 'exposure' roles in big films like Battle Of The Bulge and PT 109, where he had a blonde goatee, but not yet any serious starring parts.

Then Hardin made a couple of bad decisions. One was to pass on a western role offered by an Italian director, Sergio Leone. He wasn't the only actor to either pass or want too much money, and of course the part eventually went to Clint.  The next one was to pass on the TV show Batman, ironically because he had a comittment to film in Spain, on a  sort of spaghetti western, Hugo Fregonese's Argentinian Savage Pampas.

Hardin played the lead in Riptide, a series that was made in and set in Australia, but was shown in the US. He was in Custer Of The West, and in a weird British circus horror film, Beserk, with Joan Crawford. But his career stalled. He made three disposable spaghetti westerns in 1971, and then worked only intermittently, though he had a part in a TV movie remake of Red River, which starred James Arness and Bruce Boxleitner in the John Wayne and Montgomery Clift roles, but had parts for other old western TV stars like Hardin, Guy Madison, Robert Horton and John Lupton. Hardin was tall and good looking, but unlike Wayne or Eastwood, never really learned to control his image on screen.

Off screen was another story. His third wife was Marlene Schmidt, the East German-born Miss Universe of 1961. Ironically, she went into the film business after they divorced. In all Hardin had eight wives, and ten children. Which may help explain why he had problems with the IRS, which helps explain why he helped found the Arizona Patriots, which sounds like football team but was an anti-tax, anti-government Tea Party type group that evolved into a militia. In 1986 they were raided, and accused of planing to attack a federal office in Utah. Hardin wasn't charged with any crimes, but the group disbanded.

The photo above is not Hardin as a militia leader, but a fan show where he appeared alongside Clint Walker and Will Hutchins, and he was the only one not quite in costume. I find it tremendously nostalgic, especially now, viewing a Wild West town that only moderately appeals to my 13 year old.

Hardin died at 87. It is easy to imagine scenarios in which he was a successful film actor, or a busy TV star. But his other difference from Clint was lacking Clint's study of the business, and his nous for it. Clint's acting and directing careers are actually meshed into his producing career; he became virtually a studio himself; this would have been beyond Hardin. On the other hand, there aren't many people, not even Clint, whose obituaries will say 'he is survived by his eighth wife; his previous seven marriages all ended in divorce.'  And I found, while writing this, a reverse angle of that famous photo, an earlier unused take. Those were the days.

MAUREEN O'HARA: A Moment's Memory, RIP

Angharad's look across to Mr. Gruffydd as he stands at the top of the lift shaft, looking at the empty cage....

RIP Maureen O'Hara. Still her finest moment. How Green Was My Valley, still John Ford's most restrained and moving sentimentality. And watch her in The Wings Of Eagles, maybe her best, The Quiet Man or not, with John Wayne.

HEROES NEVER DIE: PARKER AND HAMMER

Note: this essay originally appeared as my twelfth American Eye column at Shots, in January 2009. I originally posted on this site a link to the piece, but the link no longer functions, hence my reprinting it now. But it prompted a spirited exchange with Max Allan Collins, which you can find with the original post here.

HEROES NEVER DIE

It's always sad to mark the passing of an era, and even sadder when you're reminded of another you'd marked already. This essay is dedicated to two giants of the field, which makes it appropriate that one of the books discussed is The Goliath Bone, the first of a number of Mike Hammer manuscripts Mickey Spillane left behind and which Max Allan Collins has completed. And at the end of January, less than a month after Donald Westlake's sudden death on New Year's Eve, Richard Stark's latest, and I suppose last, Parker novel, Dirty Money appears. It occurs to me you could argue that all the Parker books were begun by Westlake, and finished by Stark from Westlake's notes.

At one point in Dirty Money, the police release an artist's sketch which deliberately makes Parker kinder and softer, exactly what I mentioned when Westlake revived Stark and Parker in 1998 (was it really that long ago?). Kinder and gentler? Parker and Claire actually stay in a Berkshires B&B surrounded by leaf peepers, and Parker manages to blend in, as far as that goes. The subject of Parker aging never comes up, although his attitude toward Claire is somewhat less prehistoric than it was in the first series of books. He doesn't seem to have aged because Parker was never really a child of his time, or any time, but there is one problem: modern technology, surveillance, communications, forensics, have certainly made the life of the professional criminal more difficult.

The story picks up where Ask The Parrot left off, but the botched heist happened two books ago, in Nobody Runs Forever. I am convinced Westlake intended this story to be on-going, from book to book, for just as long as he could manage. Raymond Chandler once wrote that whenever your plotting gets stuck, have someone with a gun come in the room, Westlake has refined that dictum; the characters may or may not have guns, but they almost always have or can discover larcenous motives—double cross has always been the central theme of the Parker books. Parker is looking to collect cash he left behind in a church, and all sorts of people, from a tough-talking lesbian bounty-hunter to a hapless wanna-be true crime writer, are getting involved, and most of them are looking to take some of the dough, or all of it. They are introduced and described with such care, as are others, like the real Tony Soprano, New Jersey crime boss Frank Meany, or the Massachusetts state trooper Gwen Reversia, that you're certain they were destined to appear again. My feeling is that Parker's anonymity would continue to be compromised, book by book, until Westlake reached the point he couldn't write Parker out of. Things always came back to haunt Parker; if his life were easy, it would never have been fun to write about. Or to read. So I'm sad that my dream of Parker's Last Stand will never come about.

According to Mickey Spillane, there could never be a last stand for Mike Hammer, because 'see, heroes never die. John Wayne isn't dead. Elvis isn't dead...you can't kill a hero'. He said it to me when I interviewed him, he said it on stage the next night at the NFT, and I'm sure he said it a million more times. And it's true, but only to a point. The Duke didn't die, of course, but he went out perfectly before that death, in The Shootist. Even earlier he'd had the luxury of working his way through a host of different valedictory performances, among them The Cowboys (very good) True Grit (good) and McQ (not so good) before he and Don Siegel made their small classic.

Mike Hammer had no such luck; he's been out of print for a long time, consigned to being a relic of his era; Hammer is firmly entrench-coated into immediate postwar America, he's one of the best representations of the era's unconscious drives, and even though he moved reasonably well into the sixties, the ferocious drive and energy wasn't there; the times had changed (and so, in fairness, had Mickey). Mickey left six Hammer manuscripts in different stages of completion, and The Goliath Bone was the most fully finished, but it's also the most risky with which to launch a Hammer revival, because it's set in post 9/11 New York, thus taking Mike Hammer as far as possible out of own times and into a time warp.

Face it: Hammer has to be in his eighties by the time the jets crash into the World Trade towers. For the story's purposes, he's played as if in his late fifties or early sixties, I'd guess, and he's actually planning on making Velda an honest woman at long last, but it never jells. That's because it's not your disbelief you're being asked to suspend, but your belief, in the character Mickey created, and in the writing he did when he was young and hungry. The writing here, whether it's Mickeys or Max's, just doesn't have the same intensity; it's too knowing. The thing that made Kiss Me Deadly work so well as a film was that Robert Aldrich and Buzz Bezzerides recognised the primal drives that Hammer represented; they felt the energy in the prose, the manic power of the character. That's gone now; this Mike Hammer is far closer to Mickey doing his Miller Lite ads, or telling his fantastic stories; Stacy Keach could play this story in the TV series without too much problem; hell, Mickey might even be able to play it himself, in his 80s. But as Hammer fiction it just doesn't take off.

Not that they don't try. As Velda says, at one point, Mike is taking on, literally, the whole damn world, and the David and Goliath metaphor isn't lost on anyone. This is just before they actually do get married, and Mike turns down a hell of a seduction attempt on the eve of his wedding; this is a kinder gentler Mike Hammer too. Well kinder, maybe. And there are plenty of jokes about relics.

But even as the plot gets going, it winds up depending on his trusty .45 being not so trusty after all. The biggest twist is, if you know the Hammer novels, pretty obvious, and though it's fun, it just isn't the same thing. At one point, Pat Chambers, Hammer's long-time buddy, police foil, and longer-after Velda, says 'nothing lasts forever, Mike'. Velda tells him 'a relic is in the past, Mike'. That contradicts Mickey, who said that heroes never die, but they're both right. Heroes live forever, but they live in the worlds in which they are heroes, and they aren't always such heroes in other worlds. Apparently, some of the other unfinished Hammer novels are period pieces, and some take Hammer through the decades. I'll look forward to seeing what Mickey and Max do with Hammer in the world where he belongs. 

DIRTY MONEY by Richard Stark

Quercus, £16.99 ISBN 9781847247117

THE GOLIATH BONE by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Quercus, £17.99 ISBN9781847245953

JAMES ARNESS: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of James Arness, Marshal Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke, is in today's Indy; you can link to it here. It's pretty much as I wrote it, except the bit about the show being retitled 'Gun Law' when it ran in the UK. I had written 'imaginatively retitled', but maybe we're not as self-deprecating as we like to think here in Britain!

Arness was very much like the character he played, low key and modest, and the fact he was content to stay in the same role for 20 years was one of the keys to the show's success and its long run (Law & Order tied it with 20 seasons, but far fewer episodes, and of course a changing cast). I was never a fan, but I'd be curious to go back and see some of the shows now; perhaps the early black and white half-hours, often based on the radio scripts, were harder-hitting. Oddly enough, I am old enough to remember hearing, if not listening, to Gunsmoke on the radio--I'd have to guess I was 3 and my mother was listening.

The Wayne friendship was real, and it must have been a treat for Arness to play Tom Dunson in the TV remake of Red River; though I doubt Bruce Boxleitner carried the impact of Montgomery Clift as Matt.

IRVING RAVETCH: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Irving Ravetch, who along with his wife Harriet Frank, Jr. wrote a number of outstanding movies, particularly those directed by Martin Ritt, is in today's Guardian. You can link to it here. Hombre remains one of my favourite westerns, one I consider considerably underrated, and The Cowboys (directed by Mark Rydell) was probably appreciated less than it should have been because John Wayne was starring in it. Hud is one of the best of the contemporary westerns (The Misfits, Lonely Are The Brave) which were popular in the early Sixties, just as the huge western boom on TV was coming to an end.

The Long Hot Summer is an odd mix of Faulkner and the Actor's Studio, which makes it seem very much like a Tennessee Williams play. But the Ravetches were very good with Newman (in Norma Rae Ron Liebman does a Jewish Newman, ironically, of course). In my original version of the obit I had actually assigned the Ravetches blame for creating the opportunity for Sally Field's Oscar acceptance speech, but not surprisingly, that was lost along the way...

CLINT EASTWOOD POLISHES HIS GRAN TORINO

I've wondered for a long time what Clint Eastwood might do as a valedictory film (in fact, in my 2001 Pocket Essential Clint Eastwood I guessed an adaptation of Fenimore Cooper's Prairie might be appropriate) and while Gran Torino may well not be his final film, it feels in some ways as if it ought to be. Clint has often been compared to John Wayne, and though one can take that comparison only so far, Gran Torino begins as if it intends to be Clint's True Grit, but winds up coming closer to being his version of The Shootist.

The film begins with a funeral. Clint's Walt Kowalski is a retired Detroit factory worker whose wife has died, and at the funeral we discover there is vast distance between him and his sons, and even more with their families (one of his grandchildren is played, almost literally, as a modern Veruca Salt). He wants nothing from the parish priest who comforted his wife, and the neighbourhood itself has, like his children, abandoned him; his neighbours are Laotian Hmongs, and Latino, black, and Asian gangs cruise the streets and intimidate anyone who gets in their way. Clint's Kowalski begins the film by literally growling, rather than speaking, to those who offend him. His neighbours, whom he calls gooks or slopes, remind him of his service in Korea, and he's quick to pull out a gun when he catches their young son,  trying to steal Walt's prized cherry 1972 Gran Torino, which a gang has intimidated him into doing. It's a world well delineated by the dark camera work of Eastwood regular Tom Stern, and even the sunshine takes on a flatness which suggests time past, or lost, certainly not the glimmering sunshine of, say, LA.

Most of the rest of the film details the gradual mellowing of Walt, brought about by his growing respect for his neighbours, and the intelligence of their sassy daughter, Sue, who's well-played by Ahney Her. He then takes on the initiation of the neighbour boy, Thao, into the lost rituals of American manhood, and the story becomes one of Walt's realisation that the immigrant Lors next door have far more of the traditional American values he cherishes than his own family. There's sometimes a marked lack of subtlety in Clint's approach, usually when he's working it for comic relief: the sequences of mutual ethnic insulting with his Italian barber are pretty cringe-worthy, although they do pay off when Bee Vang stops underplaying Thao, and speaks the language of the construction foreman with whom Walt's trying to get him a job. Clint also allows himself a moment of flashback, a specific reference to Dirty Harry (if not Charles Bronson in Death Wish), when he encounters a couple of black kids bullying Sue and a white male friend. That the white kid is a pretend gangsta again provides the comic relief, but the idea of the 70-something Walt backing down the toughs, gun or no gun, seems a bit forced.

What isn't forced is the film's ending, which spoiler warning prevents my discussing, but which works emotionally and structurally, and which doesn't involve the Gran Torino, which I'd been waiting for, and which I was glad Clint avoided. It's odd to think that in the major BBC interview around this film, uber-critic Mark Lawson somehow decided this film was set in Los Angeles, thus missing the titular metaphor: the Gran Torino was one of those big muscle cars which Detroit turned out in the era when Clint was becoming a star: now they are relics, just as Walt Kowalski is, and Clint himself is, big tough products of a world which accepted toughness, appreciated values of loyalty to family,tribe, and products manufactured in the country, and most of all didn't go all politically correct. Neither the Gran Torino nor Walt (and by implication, the image of Clint) have no real place in today's world, just as the city that produced them has lost its place, and the men who worked in that city's factories making things have fled to the suburbs while their jobs have fled to the very parts of the world that spawn the immigrants in this film.

But the film's ending is not concerned with those bigger issues. Instead, as I suggested, it is Clint's Shootist moment, and carries the same sort of emotional impact; if you think back to that film, and the difference between Wayne's performance in it and the Duke's Oscar for True Grit you'll also recall The Shootist was directed by Don Siegel, one of Clint's two directing mentors. Siegel would have been proud of this film.

directed by Clint Eastwood, screenplay by Nick Schenk, story by Schenk and David Johannson