Farewell, William Goldman.

“Reading William Goldman’s prose is like watching Fred Astaire tap dance,” a reviewer once wrote.

And while I come to bury Goldman, I will not praise him for The Princess Bride, nor for Butch Cassidy.

Yes, heresy.

My point being that this prolific writer never got the credit he deserved for many other works. Like the wonderful Boys and Girls Together who tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.  And Magic, that subtly chilling tale of a schizophrenic ventriloquist and his dummy.  This is where Goldman does with words what Hitchcock did with film.

To my mind, Goldman was part of a trio of American authors who did their best work at roughly the same time – the sixties and seventies – and who’s writing was...well, I won’t  go so far as to say similar in style, but struck a comparable chord.  And their métier was often the coming of age novel or, more usually, one stage after that -- young adults coming to grips with (sometimes sordid) reality. All three writers were inspired by and often used the setting of New York City.

One was Hermann Raucher, of Summer of ‘42 fame (Hey, forget the movie, read the book before you judge me), who also did the wonderful There Should Have Been Castles and more.

The other was Evan Hunter (as Ed McBain he wrote the 87^th Precinct police procedurals, but that’s another story), who based his breakthrough The Blackboard Jungle on his experiences as a New York school teacher. I particularly liked Last Summer and the amnesiac’s tale, Buddwing -- though neither novel is flawless.

So back to Mr Goldman. Yes, yes, great screenplays, great Hollywood memoirs...and of course the immortal line, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die.” But to me his work is epitomized by Corky Withers, the ventriloquist magician sinking slowly into madness.

Farewell, William Goldman, and flights of welcoming publishers sing thee to thy rest.

Sir Martin at the bat

 

Quite a bit has been written about the rise and fall of Martin Sorrell, and I don’t have much to add beyond a personal impression I formed when he visited JWT's Bombay office back in the day.

The first thing that struck me was that he was pretty damn short – I suppose people of power loom large in the imagination, Napoleon being the classic case in point.  So here was this ex-Finance Director from Saatchi and Saatchi, architect of their acquisition and expansion spree, who had fallen out with the Corsican brothers and quit.  He had personally bought over a shopping basket manufacturer called Wire and Plastic Products, and spun that into the largest marcom empire the world had ever seen.  Largely through hostile takeover, to boot.

I was nobody much in the JWT scheme of things, but my team and I were on the Unilever business, so I had to make a snapshot presentation as he walked around the office.  So a) looking down on him is one memory I retain; and b) surprise at his single incisive question at the end of my spiel is another.

It was clear as day that here was a mind like a razor, cutting through loads of instantly digested data to the critical bit.  And minds like that are almost always flawed, in one way or another. It’s human nature. Emerging stories of the serial personal abuse suffered by his assistants and chauffeurs do not surprise me.  Neither does the alleged use of a company credit card in a Mayfair brothel.  Because hubris is perhaps the most common of these flaws.

Anyway, to get back to the Bombay visit, Sorrell was apparently a keen cricketer and a game had been organized – graced by Bishan Singh Bedi, by then comfortably retired into playing private matches for a lucrative fee.  Sir Martin at the bat was quite impressive, until caught by my senior art director, a lanky and athletic fellow with no feel for typography.

So my third impression of that day is: c) he lacked warmth, but at least he had a sense of humour, for as he walked off the field past my art director, he muttered:

 “Good catch, you’re fired.”

  THROUGH THE EYES OF THE WOLFE

      

Thank you, Tom, for 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' which I read late in life but provided such a wonderful window to the past of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and The Grateful Dead.

Thank you, Tom, for that splendid trio of city culture novels - New York's 'A Bonfire of the Vanities' , Atlanta's 'A Man in Full' and Miami's 'Back to Blood'.

Thank you most of all, Tom, for spotlighting the mystic otherness of test pilot and astronaut in 'The Right Stuff', a classic to every armchair aviator around the world.

Thank you, Tom, for the diligent research, thank you for the ebullient prose style, thank you for the chronicling of Americana as you saw it.

Thank you, Tom, and good night.