Customer Reviews

Trippin' with Terry Southern: What I Think I Remember

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have just finished reading "Trippin' with Terry Southern," and I'm beyond-impressed. I was one of Terry Southern's writing students at Columbia University in the early '90s, and Gail and Tom Lisanti have really captured this great and generous writer's fun, mischievous, magnanimous personality in a brisk, cool, immediate way. The book has been written very engagingly, and it's a great eye into the last thirty-or-so years of Southern's life, which were fraught with great good humor and sadness, in equal measure. When you read this book, you'll really feel like you "know" Terry Southern, and I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Trippin' with Terry Southern is a tragic story, in a way, of a gifted writer whose best efforts bring nothing but financial woe. Gail Gerber makes it clear from the outset that his setback was not for lack of talent. He had it in spades.

As a young actress and ballerina, Gerber left her native Canada for Hollywood. She became a beach bit actor and appeared in two Elvis Presley films before landing a role in Tony Richardson's The Loved One. This was 1964, and Terry Southern, who wrote the screenplay, would spend the rest of his life with her.

Southern was hip with the times, as they used to say, and moved with an influential set: Kubrick, Sellers, Burroughs, Genet, Plimpton, Torn, Segal, Bruce, Nilsson. He had a staunch ally in Rip Torn who, in a defamation suit against Dennis Hopper, dusted off a copy of Southern's Easy Rider script as evidence in court. Torn won his case, and in turn the world learned that much of the poignancy in the film's dialogue, most notably in the dopey campfire scene, was ripped from the pages of Southern's writing tablet. Hopper denied it, thus denying Southern his pay.

Of all his efforts, however, Southern is best remembered for his work with Peter Sellers: Casino Royale, The Magic Christian, Dr. Strangelove. In the latter, in which Sellers played three characters, the battle cry against the establishment never rang louder, and showed Southern at his satiric best.

Trippin' often reads like Carlotta Monti's memoir of W.C. Fields. Like Gerber, Monti was considerably younger than her man. Both women tried and gave up acting for more domestic roles. Neither couple married and the men drank a lot. In spite of it all, the women remained devoted to their older, talented and oftentimes insufferable men. The glaring difference was wealth. Whereas Fields was loaded--he rented in luxury--Southern found himself late in life trying to collect unemployment.

Gerber's memoir tells a sobering story of a standout writer who for all his successes remained not only underappreciated but grossly underpaid.

I had never heard of actress Gail Gerber before reading this book and knew Terry Southern mostly from being the co-writer of Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider. So I was pleasantly surprised to be drawn into Gail's entertaining 30 year trip with him. The early chapters are an interesting glimpse into the making of Gail's beach party and Elvis movies as well as Terry's films. His second film, The Loved One, is where they met. But especially enthralling to me were the later chapters where they are broke and living on the East Coast as Terry tries unsuccessfully to sell screenplay after screenplay. If you are looking for a critical essay of Terry's work, this is not the book for you, but if you are a fan of Hollywood I highly recommend it. The chapter on Easy Rider, where Gail refutes most of what Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper had been saying about Terry's contribution to the film, is worth the price alone.

I have just finished reading Trippin' and I highly recommend it. I was not familiar with Terry Southern or his work. I was motivated to read the book, because I was interested in the starlet career of Gail Gerber. Now, I am interested in delving more into the work of Mr. Southern. As noted in a prevous review, this book is not an essay on the works of Terry Southern. Instead, it provides a wonderful look into the fascinating life of a legendary hipster and his longtime companion. Mr. Lisanti and Ms. Gerber have provided an engaging and easy read, providing enough saucy info to come across as genuine and thorough, but at the same time avoiding too much salacious information. It is fascinating to read about the entertainment world of the 60s and sobering to read about the struggles at the end of Mr. Southern's life. I was left with a feeling that I really got to know Mr. Southern and Ms. Gerber. If you enjoy reading biographies involving the entertainment industry, don't miss this one.