A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern [Hardcover]

Lee Hill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 20, 2001

"When they're no longer surprised or astonished or engaged by what you say, the ball game is over. If they find it repulsive, or outlandish, or disgusting, that's all right, or if they love it, that's all right, but if they just shrug it off, it's time to retire."

-- Terry Southern

A Grand Guy

He was the hipster's hipster, the perfect icon of cool. A small-town Texan who disdained his "good ol' boy" roots, he bopped with the Beats, hobnobbed with Sartre and Camus, and called William Faulkner friend. He was considered one of the most creative and original players in the Paris Review Quality Lit Game, yet his greatest literary success was a semi pornographic pulp novel. For decades, the crowd he ran with was composed of the most famous creative artists of the day. He wrote Dr. Strangelove with Stanley Kubrick, Easy Rider with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, and worked on Saturday Night Live with a younger, louder breed of sacred cow torpedoers. He's a face in the crowd on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (the guy in the sunglasses). Wherever the cultural action was, he was there, the life of every party -- Paris in the '50s, London in the swinging '60s, Greenwich Village, and Big Bad Hollywood. Brilliant, dynamic, irrepressible, he enjoyed remarkable success and then squandered it with almost superhuman excess. There was, and ever will be, only one Terry Southern.

In a biography as vibrant and colorful as the life it celebrates, Lee Hill masterfully explores the high and low times of the unique, incomparable Terry Southern, one of the most genuine talents of this or any other age. Illuminating, exhilarating, and sobering, it is an intimate portrait of an unequaled satirist and satyrist whose appetite for life was enormous -- and whose aim was sure and true as he took shots at consumerism, America's repressive political culture, upper-class amorality, and middle-class banality.

But more than simply the story of one man, here is a wide-screen, Technicolor view of a century in the throes of profound cultural change -- frorn the first chilly blasts of the Cold War and McCarthyism to the Vietnam era and the Reagan years; from Miles and Kerouac to the Beatles, the Stones, and beyond. And always at the center of the whirlwind was Terry Southern -- outrageous, unpredictable, charming, erudite, and eternally cool; a brazen innovator and unappreciated genius; and most of all, A Grand Guy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1964, Southern was on the crest of celebrity. Not only had his underground 1959 novel, Candy (published by Olympia Press in Paris), been launched in the U.S., landing high on the bestseller list, but his screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove was critically and commercially celebrated as a comic masterpiece. Today, Candy is a cult book and Dr. Strangelove is a classic. This well-researched and thoughtful biography is the first full life of the writer, whose novels never achieved the fame of his screenplays. Born in 1924 to an impoverished professional family in Texas, Southern left college and joined the army in 1943; later, on the G.I. bill, he studied in Paris, where he became a minor, if central, player in the literary expatriate scene there. Back in the U.S. in 1953, Southern moved to Greenwich Village and "embraced the emerging idea of Hip." Hanging out with artists like Robert Frank and Larry Rivers, he began shaping his public persona and a writing career that embodied that concept. His novels Flash and Filigree (1958) and The Magic Christian (1959) earned him a small, faithful literary following. But after 1964, Southern's career stalled. Despite work on high-profile film projects like Easy Rider and Casino Royale, Southern's essentialist hipster sensibility did not readily translate to screen or novel. Hill's unpacking of Southern's complicated history should please those who remember his work fondly, but the level of detail will probably keep other readers away.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Southern's heyday was in the 1960s, when his screenplays for the films Dr. Stranglove, Barbarella, and Easy Rider were the height of cool. Born in Texas in 1924, Southern had a common rural childhood. After a stint in the army, he studied at Northwestern and then the Sorbonne. He explored the drugs, cheap cafes, music, and eroticism of Paris, where Candy was published in 1958 and quickly became a cult hit. Though initially banned in the United States, copies trickled in, and it was finally published here in 1964. It is his screenwriting credits in the 1960s that launched him into the pantheon of celebrity and found him hobnobbing with the Beatles and Stanley Kubrick. But, though his satirical edge influenced such programs as Saturday Night Live and The Larry Sanders Show, Southern's star waned. This biography falls curiously flat, given that its subject wrote some of the zaniest, most influential avant-garde pieces of his day. Journalist Hill, who interviewed Southern, offers no real analysis of how this seemingly ordinary Texan became the epitome of 1960s cool. For larger public and academic libraries. Rosellen Brewer, Monterey Cty. Free Libs., Salinas, CA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (February 20, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380977869
• ISBN-13: 978-0380977864
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #765,331 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good spadework in a first-ever bio, September 2, 2001

By 

MARGOT SHEEHAN (Gotham City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern (Hardcover)

Lee Hill was disserved by his editors, who permitted him to compile a 'Terry Southern and his times' tome that is chock-a-block with cliches and party lists, and lacking in critical focus of the man. It tries to be both cultural history and biography, and fails on both counts. However, this is the first and badly needed biography of a man who brought fame and fortune to dozens of other people, and Hill deserves to be commended for his years of spade-work.

Hill has no feel for American culture. He is apparently a Canadian who spent some time in London and is primarily a film historian. His sense of cultural history in a broader scale is ludicrously third-hand, delivered in broad generalities on the order of, "America was in the grip of repressive McCarthyism in the early fifties," or "Many well-meaning people were concerned about the plight of the negro."

Paradoxically, Hill titles his book 'A Grand Guy,' although his lack of feel for modern American cultural history makes it impossible for him to tell us where Terry Southern's 'Grand Guy' persona came from. The 'Grand Guy' act, a compound of heartiness, mock-haughty superciliousness, and college-humor hyperbole, was a standard persona for those of Southern's generation. Many of Southern's contemporaries (from Gore Vidal to Bill Buckley and even Norman Mailer) played the same notes on their fiddles. This act was a continuation of the tongue-in-cheek snootiness you find in the early years of the Luce publications (where Time letter writers would be accorded a put-down caption on the order of, "Let Subscriber Brailsford Mend His Ways!") as well as The New Yorker (think of Peter Arno's captions or E.B. White's snotty captions for squibs pulled from local newspapers). This was the accepted "hip" idiom for the 20th Century Quality-Lit man, and it reached its full effulgence in the Esquire of the 1960s, when an unrelenting, over-the-top mockery of sacred cows became the mark of sophistication. Southern's tragedy, perhaps, is that he got stuck in what was essentially a passing style of ephemeral journalism, and he was unable to grow beyond it, and he had no friends to encourage him to grow beyond it. Thus, by the early 70s, his output was reduced to self-parodying letters to his friend and imitator at the National Lampoon, Michael O'Donoghue.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An impossible way of life, November 17, 2003

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, Minnesota, U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern (Hardcover)

Students of American humor will recall the bitter end of Mark Twain's life: anti-war, atheistically critical of human beings, loosing all his money trying to protect his investment in a machine to automate the printing business. A GRAND GUY THE ART AND LIFE OF TERRY SOUTHERN does not have anything about Mark Twain or printing, but it reveals a lot about the entertainment business in the second half of the 20th century. I was interested in how Terry Southern put in some time in World War Two as a young man. He was so young, he didn't get into combat until the Battle of the Bulge, a winter offensive by the Germans after D-Day, June 6, 1944, when the guys in the 435 Quartermaster Platoon were so close to the action that a buddy standing beside Terry was killed. (p. 18). That might account for Terry's appreciation of William Burroughs, which might be a high point in the irony in this book:

"Then Chuck Barris, the mercurial producer of such TV shows as `The Dating Game,' took out an option on NAKED LUNCH and sent Southern and Burroughs first-class plane tickets to talk story at his Bel-Air mansion. The two literary outlaws were picked up by a chaffeur-driven Daimler at the airport and taken to their audience with Barris.

"Barris was just all-out insanity," says Burrough's longtime assistant, James Grauerholz. "The story is that he said, `I finally read the book last night. Can you take out the sex and drugs?' Terry and Bill looked at each other and said, `We'll try,' " (p. 201).

This is such a perfect reflection of the state of entertainment values; the people in this book kept betting their lives on being able to come up with something that will draw big at the box office. On the same page, Jerry Schatzberg remembers how much fun he had writing a script with Terry Southern of `A Cool Million' by Nathanael West: "He was brilliant with dialogue. And we had a lot of fun." (p. 201)

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very long losing streak, September 17, 2006

By 

Art Tirrell - "The Vitaman Effect" (upstate ny) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grand Guy (Paperback)

I'd heard writer Terry Southern spoken of as an almost mythical character. Knowing nothing of what he'd actually done, I hoped to come away from this read with a deeper understanding of the writing craft. I have, but in a way that surprised me.
Either Terry Southern was a phenomenal talent whose value Lee Hill doesn't quite sell, or Terry Southern was an accomplished pretender and hanger-on whose total creative output amounted, in the end, to a puff of smoke.
After reading, I lean to the latter. Despite front-and-center visibility as a member of the beat generation, and friends who were the most famous creative artists of the day, Terry Southern never really did anything memorable himself - and for me doesn't warrant inclusion among the greats.
Yes, he did things with panache - I'll give him that. His semi-pornographic novel Candy sold well. He probably deserved more credit, too, than he ended up with for the creation of films like Easy Rider and Dr. Strangelove. He didn't get it. Kubrick did, and Fonda and Hopper, and that's the bottom line: Southern comes up short. In fact, A Grand Guy reads like a recap of a very long losing streak punctuated with a very emphatic period - fired from his job as writer on Saturday Night Live.
In truth, I liked Terry Southern more before I read this book, than now, but there is still a lesson to be learned here.
In Hollywood and New York, writers are lower than dirt. Necessary, yes, because the ideas and words needed to make good drama come from them, but the moment the creativity is sucked out - the movers and shakers have a story - the writer gets pushed out of the way and in the end is lucky to end up, like Terry Southern did on the cover of the Beatles album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, as little more than another face in the crowd.
Art Tirrell is also just a face in the crowd. His 2007 novel, "The Secret Ever Keeps", contains "...simply the best underwater scenes I've ever read..." but has also been described as "...the best adventure story nobody ever heard of". http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1601640048/