Terry Southern (May 1, 1924 – October 29, 1995) was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and university lecturer, noted for his distinctive satirical style. Part of the Paris postwar literary movement in the 1950s and a companion to Beat writers in Greenwich Village, Southern was also at the center of Swinging London in the 1960s and helped to change the style and substance of American films in the 1970s. He briefly wrote for Saturday Night Live in the 1980s.
Southern's dark and often absurdist style of satire helped to define the sensibilities of several generations of writers, readers, directors, and filmgoers. He is credited by journalist Tom Wolfe as having invented New Journalism with the publication of "Twirling at Ole Miss" in Esquire in February 1963. Southern's reputation was established with the publication of his comic novels Candy and The Magic Christian and through his gift for writing memorable film dialogue as evident in Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid, and The Magic Christian. His work on Easy Rider helped create the independent film movement of the 1970s.
Southern was born in Alvarado, Texas. He graduated from Sunset High School in Dallas, Texas in 1941. He attended North Texas Agricultural College for a year as a pre-med major before transferring to Southern Methodist University, where he continued to cultivate his interest in literature. From 1943 to 1945, he served in the U.S. Army as a demolitions technician during World War II. Stationed in Reading, England with the 435th Quartermaster Platoon (allowing for frequent forays to London), he earned a Bronze Star and a Good Conduct Medal. In the autumn of 1946, he resumed his studies at the University of Chicago before transferring to Northwestern University, where he received his undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1948.
Southern left the United States in September 1948, using a G.I. Bill grant to travel to France, where he studied at the Faculté Des Lettres of the Sorbonne. His four-year stint in Paris was a crucial formative influence, both on his development as a writer and on the evolution of his "hip" persona. During this period he made many important friendships and social contacts as he became a central figure in the expatriate American café society of the 1950s. He became close friends with Mason Hoffenberg (with whom he subsequently co-wrote the novel Candy), Alexander Trocchi, John Marquand, Mordecai Richler, Aram Avakian (filmmaker, photographer and brother of Columbia Records jazz producer George Avakian), and jazz musician and motorsport enthusiast Allen Eager. He also met expatriate American writer James Baldwin and leading French intellectuals Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus.
Southern frequented the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and saw jazz performances by leading bebop musicians including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis, evoked in his classic "You're Too Hip, Baby". During the early 1950s he wrote some of his best short stories, including "The Butcher" and "The Automatic Gate", both published in David Burnett's New-Story magazine. His story "The Accident" was the first short story published in the Paris Review in its founding issue (1953); it was followed by "The Sun and the Still-born Stars" in issue #4.[1] Southern became closely identified with the Paris Review and its founders, Peter Matthiessen, Harold L. "Doc" Humes, and George Plimpton, and he formed a lifelong friendship with Plimpton. He met French model Pud Gadiot in 1952; a romance soon blossomed and the couple married just before they moved to New York City.[2][3]
In 1953, Southern and Gadiot returned to the US and settled in Greenwich Village in New York City. As he had in Paris, Southern quickly became a prominent figure on the artistic scene that flourished in the Village in the late 1950s. He met visual artists such as Robert Frank and Larry Rivers. Through Mason Hoffenberg, who made occasional visits from Paris, he was introduced to leading beat writers including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.
He frequented renowned New York jazz venues such as the Five Spot, the San Remo, and the Village Vanguard. It was in this period that Southern read and became obsessed with the work of British writer Henry Green. Green's writing exerted a strong influence on Southern's early work, and Green became one of Southern's most ardent early supporters.
Southern struggled to gain recognition during this period, writing short stories as he worked on Flash and Filigree, his first solo novel. Most of these stories were rejected by leading magazines and journals. Here, as in Paris, Southern was almost entirely supported by his wife Pud, but their relationship fell apart within a year of their arrival in New York and they were divorced in mid-1954.
During 1954 and 1955. Southern met two of his literary heroes, William Faulkner and Nelson Algren. Southern interviewed Algren for the Paris Review in the autumn of 1955. They kept in touch after the interview, and Algren became another of Southern's early friends and champions.
Southern's fortunes began to change after he was taken on by the Curtis-Brown Agency in mid-1954; through them he had three of his short stories accepted by Harper's Magazine. It published "The Sun and the Still-born Stars" and "The Panthers" in the same edition in late 1955, and "The Night Bird Blew for Doctor Warner" was featured in the January 1956 edition.
In October 1955, Southern met model, aspiring actress, and editor Carol Kauffman. They were married on July 14, 1956.[4]
Southern returned to Europe with Kauffman in October 1956, stopping off in Paris and then settling in Geneva, Switzerland, where they lived until 1959. Kauffman took a job with UNESCO, which supported them as Southern continued to write. The years in Geneva were a prolific period during which he prepared Flash and Filigree for publication, and worked on Candy and The Magic Christian as well as TV scripts and short stories. The couple made trips to Paris, where they visited Mason Hoffenberg, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and to London, where Southern met Henry Green and Kenneth Tynan.
During his time in New York, Southern had written a short story "about a girl in Greenwich Village who got involved with a hunchback because she was such a good Samaritan" and this became the core of Candy, co-written with Mason Hoffenberg. On his return to Paris in late 1956, Southern showed the story to several people, including Hoffenberg, who thought the character should have more adventures. Southern encouraged Hoffenberg to write one; this became the sequence where Candy goes to the hospital to see Dr. Krankheit. The pair began alternately creating chapters, working together regularly on visits to Tourrettes-sur-Loup over the spring and summer of 1957. The book was introduced to publisher Maurice Girodias, probably by Marilyn Meeske (later Marilyn Meeske Sorel) [who?] who, according to Southern, thought Girodias would be interested in it as a "dirty book".[5]
André Deutsch accepted Flash and Filigree, Southern's first novel, early in 1957, and the short story "A South Summer Idyll" was published in Paris Review No. 15. The Southerns spent some time in Spain with Henry Green during the summer, and Southern interviewed him for the Paris Review. Several more short stories were published later that year, by which time he was finishing work on Candy. Southern and Gregory Corso helped convince Girodias to publish the controversial novel Naked Lunch by then-little-known author Burroughs.
In early 1958, Southern made his first foray into screenwriting, working with Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, who had come to Britain to work for the newly established ABC Weekend TV company. Kotcheff directed Southern's TV adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, which was broadcast in the UK in March. This coincided with the publication of Flash and Filigree, which was well-reviewed in the UK but coolly received in the U.S.
The first major magazine interview with Southern, conducted by Elaine Dundy, was published in UK Harper's Bazaar in August 1958. In October, Olympia published Candy under the pseudonym Maxwell Kenton, and it immediately was banned by the Paris vice squad.
The Magic Christian, Southern's first solo novel, satirically explores the corrupting effects of money. He finished the book in Geneva over the fall and winter of 1958–1959. and it was published by André Deutsch in Spring 1959 to mixed reviews; however, it soon gained an avid cult following. By the time it had been published, the Southerns had decided to return to the U.S.; they left Geneva for New York in April 1959.[6]
After moving back to the U.S., the Southerns stayed with friends for several months until they were able to buy their own home. They were looking for a rural retreat close enough to New York to allow Terry to commute there. Southern met and became friendly with jazz musician and bandleader Artie Shaw, and they began looking for properties together. Shaw put down a deposit on a farm in East Canaan, Connecticut, but at the urging of a friend Southern convinced Shaw to let him buy the farm, which he purchased for $23,000.
During 1959 and 1960, he continued working on a never-completed novel titled The Hipsters, which he had begun in Geneva. He became part of the New York artists and writers 'salon' of his old friend Plimpton—who had also moved back to New York— frequenting the Cedar Tavern, rubbing shoulders with writers James Jones, William Styron, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Harold "Doc" Humes, Jack Gelber, Jules Feiffer, Blair Fuller, Gore Vidal, Kenneth Tynan, the Aga Khan, the cast of the British comedy stage revue Beyond The Fringe, Jackie Kennedy, British actress Jean Marsh, and Tynan's first wife, Elaine Dundy, through whom Southern met satirist Lenny Bruce.
Flash and Filigree had been published in the U.S. by Coward McCann in the fall of 1958. Several fragments from The Hipsters were published as short stories during this period, including "Red-Dirt Marijuana" published, in the January–February 1960 edition of Evergreen Review; and "Razor Fight", published in Glamour magazine. He had an essay on Lotte Lenya published in Esquire. In early 1960, he began writing book reviews for The Nation, which were published over the next two years. During the year, he collaborated with his old Paris friends Trocchi and Richard Seaver, compiling "Writers in Revolt," an anthology of modern fiction for the Frederick Fall company. The editing process took much longer than expected: A drug bust led Trocchi to flee to the UK via Canada, leaving Southern and Seaver to finish the book, and editor Stephen Levine was recruited to assist.
Terry and Carol's son and only child Nile Southern was born on December 29, 1960. Around this time, Southern began writing for Maurice Girodias' new periodical Olympia Review. He began negotiations with the Putnam company to reissue Candy under his and Hoffenberg's real names, and he hired Sterling Lord as his literary agent, .
In the summer of 1962, Southern worked for two months as a relief editor at Esquire, and during this period, he had several stories published in the magazine, including "The Road to Axotle". Through Esquire, he interviewed rising filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who had completed his controversial screen adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita. Although Southern knew little about Kubrick, the director was well aware of Southern's work, having been given a copy of The Magic Christian by Peter Sellers during the making of Lolita.
Southern's life and career changed irrevocably on November 2, 1962, when he received a telegram inviting him to come to London to work on the screenplay of Kubrick's new film, which was then in pre-production.[7]
Partly on the recommendation of Peter Sellers, Stanley Kubrick asked Southern to help revise the screenplay of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). The film was based on the Cold War thriller Red Alert (1958) by Peter George, the rights to which Kubrick had secured for $3,000. Kubrick and George's original screenplay (which was to be called Edge of Doom) was a straight political thriller. They then reworked it into a satirical format (provisionally titled The Delicate Balance of Terror) in which the plot of Red Alert was situated as a film-within-a-film made by an alien intelligence.[8]
Southern's work on the project was brief but intense; he officially worked on the script from November 16 to December 28, 1962. Southern began to rely on the amphetamine-barbiturate "diet pill" Dexamyl to keep him going through the frantic rewriting process; in later years, he developed a long-term amphetamine dependency. His amphetamine abuse, combined with his heavy intake of alcohol and other drugs, contributed significantly to health problems in later life.
The major change Southern and Kubrick made was to recast the script as a black comedy, jettisoning the "film within a film" structure. Kubrick, George, and Southern shared the screenplay credits, but competing claims about who contributed what led to confusion and some conflict among the three men after the film's release. The credit question was confused by Sellers' numerous ad libbed contributions—he often improvised wildly on set, so Kubrick made sure that Sellers had as much camera 'coverage' as possible during his scenes in order to capture these spontaneous inspirations.
According to Art Miller,[citation needed] an independent producer who hired Southern to write the screenplay for a never-completed comic film about the bumbling Watergate burglars, Southern told him that the best example of his writing in Dr. Strangelove was the scene in which B-52 pilot T.J. "King" Kong, played by Slim Pickens, reads off a list of the contents of a survival kit to his crew, concluding that a man could have "a pretty nice weekend in Vegas" with some of the items. When the scene was shot, Pickens spoke the scripted line ("Dallas"), but the word " Vegas" was overdubbed during post-production because the film was released not long after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963.[9]
According to Miller,[citation needed] Peter Sellers quietly paid Southern tens of thousands of dollars to create some of the best-known comedy bits for Sellers' character Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther film series.
Southern also helped Sellers with dialogue coaching. Originally slated to play four roles, including that of the Texan B-52 bomber pilot Major Kong, the actor had difficulty mastering the accent. Southern, a native Texan, taped himself speaking Kong's lines for Sellers to study. Sellers, who had never been comfortable in the role of Kong, was able to extricate himself from the part after allegedly fracturing his ankle, forcing Kubrick to re-cast. The part eventually went to actor Slim Pickens, who Kubrick met during his brief stint working on Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks.
After the film went into wider release in January 1964, Southern was the subject of considerable media coverage, and erroneously was given primary credit for the screenplay,[10] a misperception he did little to correct. This reportedly angered both Kubrick—who was notorious for his unwillingness to share writing credits[11]—and Peter George, who penned a complaint to Life magazine in response to a lavish photo essay on Southern published in the May 8, 1964 edition. Stung by the article's assertion that Southern was responsible for turning the formerly "serious script" into an "original irreverent satirical film", George pointed out that he and Kubrick had been working together on the script for 10 months, whereas Southern was only "briefly employed (November 16–December 28, 1962) to do some additional writing."[12]
Toward the end of his work on Dr. Strangelove, Southern began canvassing for more film work. Jobs he considered included a proposed John Schlesinger screen adaptation of the Iris Murdoch novel A Severed Head, and a project called The Marriage Game, to be directed by Peter Yates and produced by the James Bond team of Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli. He also wrote an essay on John Fowles' novel The Collector, which led to his work as a "script doctor" on the subsequent screen version.
Southern's writing career took off in 1963. His essay "Twirlin' at Ole Miss" was published in Esquire in February 1963, and this work of satirical reportage is now acknowledged as one of the cornerstone works of New Journalism. This was quickly followed by the publication of several other essays, including the Bay of Pigs-themed "Recruiting for the Big Parade",[13] and one of his best Paris stories, "You're Too Hip, Baby". The fiction anthology Writers In Revolt was published in the spring, soon followed by the U.S. publication of Candy, which became the #2 American fiction best-seller of 1963.
The success of Dr. Strangelove and the re-published version of Candy was the turning point in Southern's career, making him one of the most celebrated writers of his day. In the words of biographer Lee Hill, Southern spent the next six years in "an Olympian realm of glamour, money, constant motion and excitement", mixing and working with international literary, film, music, and TV stars. His work on Dr. Strangelove opened the doors to lucrative work as a screenwriter and script doctor, and allowed him to greatly increase his fee, from the reported $2,000 he received for Dr. Strangelove to as much as $100,000 thereafter.[14]
During the latter half of the 1960s, Southern worked on the screenplays of a string of "cult" films. His credits in this period include The Loved One (1965), The Collector (1965), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Casino Royale (1967), Barbarella (1968), Easy Rider (1969), The Magic Christian (1969), and End of the Road (1970).
In early 1964, Southern was hired to collaborate with British author Christopher Isherwood on a screen adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel The Loved One, directed by British filmmaker Tony Richardson. When filming was postponed in the spring of 1964, Southern returned to East Canaan and continued work on a rewrite of the script for the film version of John Fowles' The Collector but he eventually withdrew from the project because he disagreed with the change to the story's ending.
In August 1964, the Southerns moved to Los Angeles, where Terry began work on the screenplay of The Loved One, for which MGM/Filmways paid him $3,000 per month. Southern's work and his networking and socializing brought him into contact with many Hollywood stars, including Ben Gazzara, Jennifer Jones, Janice Rule, George Segal, Richard Benjamin, James Coburn, Peter Fonda, and Dennis Hopper and his wife Brooke Hayward. Hopper, a fan and collector of modern art, later introduced Southern to British gallery owner and art dealer Robert Fraser.
Not long after arriving in Los Angeles, Souther