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MOSES WINE IS BORN

Recollecting the morning of September 11, 2001, I sometimes think that my fictional hero, my alter ego, detective Moses Wine, was among the tragic, desperate figures plunging down the façade of the World Trade Center. Even that day, I sensed it. The values and worldview of the left-wing hippie detective—the “stoned Sam Spade” as the Los Angeles Times called him years ago—had been battered practically beyond recognition, as had mine. I tried to explain this in my eighth Moses Wine novel, Director’s Cut, but the book received the least attention and some of the most mediocre reviews of any I had written. Moses Wine’s fans didn’t want a revised Moses—at least a fair percentage of them didn’t.

I owed a lot to Moses, and still do. I had invented him almost on a whim twenty-nine years before that September, sitting in my backyard in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles, sharing a joint with Alan Rinzler. It was like a scene from some Sergeant Pepper rerun—two lost Jewish members of the Beatles, me with a John Lennon beard and long, scraggly (but already prematurely thinning) hair, Alan with an Afro à la Abbie Hoffman or Dylan—giggling from marijuana.

Inside, I wasn’t so happy. Alan, the editor of my first two novels, was rejecting my third. He had just become the head of Straight Arrow Books, the new publishing arm of Rolling Stone, and his “business guy” had said my latest effort—a grim, Simenon-like tale of an anti-Castro Cuban in LA kidnapping the child of the radical lawyer next door on the anniversary of the Bay of Pigs—was not commercial. No doubt his “business guy” was right. I knew it even then. Alan felt guilty, however. We were friends, and he didn’t want to reject me. The other books I’d done for him were successful, relatively, anyway. And the Cuban one might have been better written than the previous two books. But this time he was working for a new publisher. Indeed, he was almost the publisher himself, as long as he stayed in the good graces of Jann Wenner, the young and ambitious founder of Rolling Stone and the real publisher in this instance. He had to think as a businessman, albeit a stoned one—not much of a contradiction in those days.

“Couldn’t you do something more Rolling Stone?” he asked me. If only I could, I thought. At that moment I was pretty close to broke. No Hollywood jobs. No novel. Two little kids and a wife, and no prospects. My father’s warnings about going to medical school as a backup were sounding all too accurate. But then something came out of me in a rush, something I’d never thought of before. “Y’know,” I said, “I’ve been reading a lot of detective novels lately … Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler … maybe I could do a detective for our generation … Left-wing, hippie-ish … smokes hash instead of drinks booze…”

Alan’s eyes lit up. “Wow, that’s great!” he said, “How fast can you do it…? And what do you want to call your dick?” “Moses Wine,” I said, equally impetuously. That was the name of the protagonist in an autobiographical novel I’d been playing with, for lack of anything better to do.

“Perfect,” Alan said. Then he added, “Make him divorced, with kids,” already identifying with the character.

About six weeks later I had written The Big Fix, which became a best-seller. It has been published in a half dozen editions in the U.S. since and in over a dozen languages. It also jump-started my Hollywood career and was made into a movie starring Richard Dreyfuss, for which I did the script. I wrote seven more “Moses Wine” books, which won awards in the U.S. and abroad, and made me friends in many countries.

In other words, it changed my life. Now I was the guy who wrote the radical hippie detective. Sometimes I liked the idea. Sometimes I wished I did something else, something with more apparent gravitas. Why not make films à la Antonioni, perhaps, or write fat, impenetrable novels in the style of Gaddis—or anyone else whose books appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, not on the back pages under “Crime.” But Moses Wine was what I was most identified with for many years, and it wasn’t so bad. I’m not going to go on here about the ever-shifting line between popular and serious fiction, or about whether Edmund Wilson was correct in his attack on the mystery genre in “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” It was never an argument that interested me, except in the areas of pride and ego. I didn’t like being in the back of the bus. But intellectually I was and am bored by the question. If Wilson didn’t like mysteries, that’s fine with me. I’ve always preferred Graham Greene to Edmund Wilson anyway.

My strategy for writing The Big Fix, and the Moses Wine novels in general, was a simple one. I just selected a crime I thought relevant, put myself in the role of detective, and used as much of myself as possible, pulling in as many details from my personal life and times as I could. I never really outlined the books, just made them up as I went along, “taught myself the story,” as Gore Vidal described his own process. I didn’t even always know “whodunit” in advance. In first person detective fiction, I told myself, this was a superior technique, since it put the author in the emotional and psychological position of the detective, baffled by the crime and trying to figure it out until the end. It would also add spontaneity. Privately, however, I was embarrassed and insecure about my casual approach until, a few years on, while appearing on a panel for aspiring writers with Tony Hillerman—then considered a master of the genre for his books starring Navajo detective Jim Chee—I was asked the question of questions: “Do you outline your stories or do you make them up as you go along?” On the spot in front of an audience of perhaps two hundred with a tape recorder going, I could not tell a lie. “I make them up as I go along,” I admitted. The unexpected sigh of relief next to me came from the multiple-award-winning Hillerman. He did, too, he told the audience, who appeared confused by these surprise admissions from supposed professionals in the form. This was not what they had learned in school.

Of course, the secret to my thrillers was that I stayed as close as possible to the zeitgeist. Indeed, that was easy, because the impulse to make an impact on the affairs of the day was what propelled my desire to do the Moses Wine series in the first place. In a way, it was my first, bizarre entry into blogging—blogging with a plot, you might call it. The Big Fix, as an example, was written at the height of the McGovern campaign of 1972, for which I was walking precinct. I simply turned the bland peacenik McGovern into the bland peacenik Miles Hawthorne and changed the background from a presidential to a California senatorial campaign. (Ah, fiction!) For the mystery premise, I had Hawthorne (McGovern) being smeared, his campaign endangered, by the backing of Howard Eppis—an Abbie Hoffman-style renegade who was making statements to the effect that Hawthorne was the man finally to bring the dreamedof revolution to capitalist America.

Moses Wine was brought into the case to find this Eppis, if indeed it really was Eppis, by his old Berkeley girlfriend Lila Shea, now a Hawthorne campaign worker. (“The last time I saw Lila Shea,” it began, “we were making love in the back of a Chevy hearse across from the Oakland Induction Center. Tear gas was going off in our ears…. etc.”) My Moses doesn’t care much for Hawthorne (too middle-of-the-road), but Lila is killed not long after they see each other again and he takes the case to avenge her death. Classic detective stuff, with a Sixties spin.

I had no idea how well it was going to work. I was just having fun. Partly for that reason, I brought in the character of Aunt Sonya—a wiseacre Jewish great aunt with a socialist-anarchist background straight out of the Yiddishe bund—as a kind of sidekick and conscience to Moses not to stray from the radical line. (In the movie version, she joked about her romantic relations with Bakunin. “He was a very good dancer,” she said.) I never had such an aunt, but in those days I think I wished I had. I came from that Jewish-WASP background and to me the old socialists, closer to my wife Dyanne’s family but still distant even from them, were warmer, more authentic people, haymishe in the Yiddish expression.

When I look at this from a contemporary perspective, my move toward neoconservative politics stems, in part, anyway, from a similar impulse. I wanted to join those former Trotskyites—the Podhoretzes and the Kristols—in what I imagined to be their haymishe pro-democracy world. Of course, I never would have conceived of this odyssey when writing The Big Fix. In those days I worried whether I was radical enough. Was I a sell-out, taking advantage of my lefty friends and connections? Ironically, years later, when I became a friend of John Podhoretz, the scion of the neocon family and his father’s successor as the editor of Commentary, he told me that the Moses Wine books were the only left-wing literature of our generation that he could stand. He identified with the character, and with his humor, in spite of himself.

Even before it was published, The Big Fix was given a boost by Ross Macdonald (the pen name of Kenneth Millar) who was then the dean of American detective fiction and on the cover of Newsweek. Phillip Handler, a professor of mine at Dartmouth, had passed the manuscript to a friend of his who was friends with Millar/Macdonald. I was in awe of Macdonald, preferring his work even to Chandler and Hammett’s for its more intellectually complex Freudian underpinnings. I assumed that he wouldn’t be impressed with my pastiche. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only did he admire my work, he gave it the most extraordinary send-off imaginable, calling it a revolution in the field. I haven’t had a comparable experience in my professional life to when I first opened that letter from Ken, not even the day I found out I was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay of Enemies: A Love Story. The Big Fix, after all, was all mine; Moses Wine was all mine. And I knew that, with his backing, it would be noticed.

Several weeks later I drove up to meet Millar at his home in Santa Barbara. When I arrived, he was waiting in the courtyard of the El Patio Mexican Restaurant wearing a black Borsalino. I was wearing a similar hat, signature apparel for detective writers, as if we’d modeled ourselves on film noir characters and belonged to the famous LAPD Hat Squad circa 1940. Millar greeted me like an old friend. Of all the writers I’ve ever met, Ken was the most generous with his colleagues. Unlike the many authors who denigrate their competition, sometimes viciously, he made an effort to encourage young talent and even to buck up older veterans after years of failure.

I saw this often at that El Patio Restaurant, where I’d go every month for the writers’ lunch grouped around Ken. The pain he’d endured in his personal life made this generosity of spirit all the more impressive. (He and author Margaret Millar’s only child was a disturbed young woman who, like one of the disappearing children in Ken’s own novels, ran away from home and spent time in Camarillo State Mental Hospital before dying of a brain hemorrhage at thirty-one.) There was a nobility to the man similar to the honorable knight critics and readers found in his protagonist Lew Archer. I didn’t quite realize it then, but when Ken wrote of my work that I was “the most brilliant new writer of private detective fiction who has emerged in some years” and that “The Big Fix, like The Big Sleep, should become something of a landmark in its field,” he was giving me a gift that would ensure the book’s success with good reviews, foreign translations, and literary prizes.

Those prizes included that year’s Best First Mystery from the Crime Writers of Great Britain, a group traditionally unfriendly to American authors. Hugely flattered, I flew to London for the awards banquet. Also in attendance was my actor friend Richard Dreyfuss, who, after many ups and downs, would play Moses Wine in The Big Fix movie six years later.

Richard, who had just made his first sensation at twenty-four in American Graffiti, was in London playing the lead in an art film. He sat in the back of the banquet room, calling attention to himself by breaking in on the proceedings sotto voce. The fusty British authors on the dais were clearly put off, and I was embarrassed. Richard was there at my behest. Soon enough, the self-aggrandizement was mercifully over and I accepted the award from Dick Francis, the dean of British crime writers and the author of dozens of horse racing mysteries. I remember that he introduced me as a soon-to-be “old lag,” British parlance for someone who writes workmanlike thrillers year after year and then goes to his grave. Was this what I wanted to be? The room seemed to be full of them. I had more interest in Dreyfuss, despite his narcissistic outbursts and even though I knew that dealing with movie stars like him would be complicated at best.

What I didn’t realize is that years later Richard and I—then comrades, as he came from a socialist background—would be on differing sides politically, although in Richard’s case those differences would be nuanced. Unlike like many actors, he was an intelligent man who actually read books before he spouted off. But what I was watching back then in London was a need for the limelight under any circumstances—a need that almost always carries through for actors. In those days, this wasn’t a problem for me, because many of those actors identified with Moses Wine, wanted to be seen as the “hero of the people,” especially if that hero was a private dick who acted heroically and got the girls.

Of course, not everyone liked The Big Fix. I got my biggest pushback from those “girls,” more specifically “women,” because the book was published in 1973, when the Women’s Liberation Movement was sweeping the intelligentsia. It had hit my own household with a vengeance. Dyanne was a founding member of one of the first women’s consciousness-raising groups in LA, probably in the country. Most members of the group were in the media and film—among them journalist Marcia Seligson, filmmaker Lynne Littman (who made the 1983 anti-nuke melodrama Testament), and graphic artist Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, who helped establish the Women’s Building in downtown Los Angeles. They met weekly in one of the women’s homes, including ours, and I remember listening to their conversations from the second floor balcony, a male spy on the women’s movement, nervous that I’d fall off and make a spectacle of myself.

Some of these consciousness-raising discussions were earnest and theoretical, but the more interesting ones contained personal gossip about the women themselves and the men in their lives—who was sleeping with whom, who was a male chauvinist pig or a philanderer, and what the women themselves were up to. And everyone was up to a lot. This was the era when sexual liberation was in the air and monogamy challenged as a form of male oppression or just old-fashioned bourgeois repression. Whatever the case, sexual politics and plain old ordinary sex of the libidinal variety were getting mixed up as never before.

This got more intense when a men’s consciousness-raising group was formed as a rejoinder to the women’s group, in a fit of what might be described as vagina envy. If the women could get together and dish, the men could, too—so long as they couched it in the self-abnegating rhetoric of the era. Along with me in this partly self-lacerating but superficially political endeavor was a similar group of young and ambitious LA artsy types, including the soon-to-be directors Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious) and Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman, married then to Lynne Littman in the women’s group, now to Helen Mirren), architect Peter de Bretteville (married to Sheila Levrant de Bretteville), the photographer Ben Lifson (married to poetess Martha Lifson in the women’s group), painter Lance Richbourg, and lawyer Tom Pollack, who was then the attorney of wunderkind George Lucas and one day would be the head of Universal Studios. We seemed to be a high-powered cabal in the making, paying ritual obeisance to breaking the shackles of male chauvinism.

Well, not completely. What soon evolved is that Ben Lifson was having an open affair (open to us, anyway) with the girlfriend of one of the youngest men in our group. His name was Steve—I can’t remember his surname, but that’s just as well—and he happened to be a photography student of Lifson’s at Cal Arts. This was all a subject of constant men’s group discussion. “Open marriage” was trendy then and we had before us a living, breathing example of it. Within a few weeks, however, all theory was going out the window as the sordidness of the reality set in. Members of the group justifiably grew to hate Ben and to pity the pathetic Steve. I say pathetic because he went along with this without doing the natural thing—kicking Ben in the balls—while justifying his inaction in the now comical ideological rhetoric of the period.

Against this background I began to conceive Wild Turkey, the second Moses Wine novel, which was deliberately more comic than its predecessor. People had told me The Big Fix was funny. That was news to me, but I accepted it, nodding as if the humor was intentional. It may be that the best comedy is unintentional—it’s simply the honest observation of reality. But for the next book, I decided to be more overt about it.

At the beginning of the new novel, Moses—who’d become a minor celebrity from his Big Fix adventure—is burst in on at three in the morning by Dr. Gunther Thomas, a not very well disguised version of Hunter Thompson, the ‘gonzo’ journalist and author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Dr. Thomas wants to do a profile of the “hippie Sam Spade” for Rolling Stone. He’s even got a case for Wine. The best-selling author Jock Hecht—a Norman Mailer-type who has written a notorious book on sexual freedom—is wanted for the murder of the anchorwoman on a TV morning news program. He needs someone to help get him off. Trouble is, Moses’s “ex” is in India with her guru and has left him with their young kids, one of who is still in diapers (the Women’s Lib angle!) and constantly in need of a change. Undeterred, Dr. Gunther Thomas grabs Moses and the kids, and off we go.

The plot, as it is with these stories, is intentionally convoluted, but suffice it to say that Jock Hecht himself is murdered in short order. Moses is hired by Jock’s attractive widow, Nancy, who reveals (shades of the men’s consciousness group) that she and Jock had had an open marriage. It had been Jock’s idea, with Nancy going along grudgingly. She and Moses are kindred spirits in that regard. They both recoil from open marriage, but feel guilty or a little square or a combination of the two for being so conventional. Naturally, they fall for each other, but due to the conventions of the genre, their romance is not to be.

Reflecting on this today, with the perspective of over three decades, it’s hard to believe that we were all so naïve about marriage. (It’s not hard to believe, however, that this story attracted Warren Beatty—but more on that later.) Basing human relationships on ideology is almost comically absurd and most often a convenient lie. But I did enjoy writing—and, yes, I admit, to researching—the scenes set at a sexual freedom “institute” in Topanga Canyon—the same one (Sandstone) that had been the basis for Gay Talese’s notorious “new journalist” studies of American mores.

It’s fair to ask me whether I participated personally in the “open marriage” experiment of the time. To be honest, I didn’t have the guts, even if I wanted to—and I didn’t want to, in the end. But that didn’t mean I was honest with my spouse or she with me. Perhaps influenced by the temper of the times, or just by our own characters, we did cheat on each other. As the Wine books and, consequently, my movie career, were mushrooming, my wife and one of my best friends—both of whom were writers, but frustrated in their careers—were having a long and involved affair. Of course, envy wasn’t their only motivation. I was plenty to blame myself. But by the Eighties, my marriage with Dyanne Asimow, from which we had two beautiful children, was dead. I was on my way as a grown man to live out the experiences most have as a teenager or young adult. I would be married again, this time for only a short while, and then have numerous relationships—sometimes telling myself it was for art—before winding up married a third time, happily and permanently. In a way, the Wine books can be looked upon as a hidden journal of my three marriages and those relationships.

All this was life imitating art imitating life imitating …For a while I was too busy living this out to write the book, so my editor Alan Rinzler, anxious to get a sequel published, invited me up to San Francisco to finish it. He locked me in the same room at the Seal Rock Inn where Hunter Thompson had just completed his latest book for Straight Arrow. We shared the same cleaning lady, who would come into the room while I banged away on my Selectric, look into the bathroom, and say, shaking her head, “Mr. Thompson—he had so many pills in that cabinet.” No doubt.

The only other visitor I had was Alan, who showed up early each evening for the pages (I was trying to knock out about ten per day), peruse them, and then work with me on where the next part of the story was headed. This reminded me of the way Hollywood “scribes” were said to have worked in the Thirties and Forties, passing the pages under the door to cigar-chomping producers. (Alan smoked joints incessantly.) One result of having an editor with me on a daily basis may have been that Wild Turkey (named for the bourbon swilled by the Hunter Thompson character) has the most carefully wrought plot of any of my books. I know this because it was so easy to adapt into a screenplay. I have personally worked on a film version of three of my books—The Big Fix, The Straight Man, and Wild Turkey—and Turkey worked most perfectly because of its tight plotting, an indispensable element of good screenwriting. At one point I expected Wild Turkey to be completed first, even though The Big Fix was the earlier book and had been under option already.

When The Big Fix came out, there was an immediate flutter of Hollywood attention. Mike Gruskoff, a classic movie producer with roots in the garment business, took the book to Twentieth Century Fox and the studio optioned it for the hot new director of the time—Martin Scorsese. I’d seen his groundbreaking Mean Streets, which I considered the best film by a new American director in years, and was thrilled. How could this be happening to me?

Well, it didn’t. I met with Marty, who seemed standoffish—curious, considering that he’d signed up to direct. After a few weeks he drifted out of contact. It turned out that something better—in his eyes, at least—had come up; he was off directing Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore with Ellen Burstyn. Gruskoff and I were left on our own. He suggested another director—a kid named Steven Spielberg who’d just made a television movie (Duel) everybody liked. He was supposedly interested in my book. I scoffed. How could this person, younger than I was by two or three years and a television (snort!) director to boot, understand the political nuances of my revolutionary novel? I remember having several arguments about this with Gruskoff, who—for some misguided reason—thought that I was being belligerent and selfish. What’d he know? He was a dumb producer from the schmatta business, no less. Besides, in my heart of hearts, I thought I should direct the movie. Who was this Spielberg? Soon enough, Stephen had drifted away as well, leaving Mike and me to develop the script on our own. It was never made. Within two years, Spielberg had directed both Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Looking back, I think I must have been an arrogant idiot to pass up what could have been a life-changing opportunity. (It wasn’t the only time that happened. Years later I told my agent I had no interest in adapting the dull novel that had been submitted to me—Forrest Gump.) But Hollywood is like that: halfway between the stock market and Las Vegas. You’re never sure where you stand and when to jump in or out.

And I did get a second chance. Just after Wild Turkey was published, there was another round of buzz. Someone even told me that Warren Beatty was showing up at parties with a copy of my book in his hip pocket, telling people he wanted to play the lead. Flattering though it was, that seemed strange to me. The very WASP-y Beatty didn’t seem like much of a fit with the Jewish Moses Wine (I’d imagined Dreyfuss from the start), and in those days I had no idea Beatty was remotely political. I still saw him as the pretty boy who made his mark opposite Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass and then continued to amass a long list of equally glamorous leading ladies. In any event, nothing happened and that gossip disappeared into the great maw of the movie business when Warner Brothers bought the rights to Wild Turkey for producer Gene Corman, brother of the notorious Roger Corman of low-budget horror fame.

I worked on a script for Gene, which, to my surprise and pleasure, the studio actually liked on its first submission. Everything moved swiftly. Gene, the Warners executive in charge of the project, and I agreed that Richard Dreyfuss should play Moses. Richard was living in Malibu then, not working. I heard the studio was about to make him a “pay-or-play” offer (usually a guarantee of production, as they didn’t want to “pay” without the “play”) of $500,000—a decent fee in 1975. I also heard that Richard was primed to accept it. All that we needed was the final okay from former agent Ted Ashley, who was then CEO of Warners.

It never came. The script was placed in the dreaded “turn-around,” a process by which the studio returns the now tarnished screenplay to the producer to find financing elsewhere—not an easy thing, since the original studio usually attaches onerous inflated costs. Corman, however, was determined to get my script done, convincing me against my better judgment to bowdlerize my work in the time-honored Hollywood tradition. First we made Moses Wine not Jewish (Jewish characters were generally considered a no-no, despite the large number of Jews in the Industry), then not a detective (there were too many detective movies—we made him city attorney); then we moved the locale from Los Angeles to Atlanta. None of this worked, as acts of desperation rarely do.

The whole affair made me depressed and ornery, so, again in the time-honored Hollywood tradition, I blamed my agent. At this point it was William Morris, but I had several suitors, including Ziegler Ross and Adams, Ray & Rosenberg, both known as respected “literary” agencies. (I put that in quotes because what passed for literary in Hollywood would set eyes rolling in Manhattan. They were the best of a dubious crop.) The Morris office knew that I was ready to jump and asked what they could do for me. I said that whatever it was, they should do it soon, because I was considering other options.

They were aware of Warren Beatty’s interest in my books. He was a William Morris client, so I had an appointment with him almost immediately; as luck would have it, he lived in a penthouse at the top of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, only a moment’s walk from William Morris.

I don’t remember my heart thumping as I rode up the private elevator at the Wilshire, but it surely must have been. It’s hard to fix dates so long ago, but it had to have been late 1975 or early 1976, as you will see. The elevator opened on Beatty’s apartment, which, though it was supposed to be a penthouse, didn’t seem remotely like one. It was a dank place, books and scripts scattered about, making it more like the home of a messy grad student than of a movie star. Warren, who was sitting in the middle of this jumble in his shirtsleeves, gestured for me to enter. He was on the phone but was off quickly and flashed the charismatic smile that the world knew well from the movies.

Beatty’s “star wattage” was at its peak, thanks to a virtually unbroken line of hits from Bonnie and Clyde to McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo and The Parallax View. I am not the first to note this, but encounters with Beatty are almost always a form of seduction. In the case of men, he goes for your talent. He had read my work and was aware of my leftism, obviously, but I was still surprised that the first thing out of his mouth after saying hello was whether I knew who John Reed was. Sure, I quickly replied, mentioning Ten Days That Shook the World, Reed’s seminal 1919 work on the Russian Revolution, as if I had read it. I hadn’t. Well, Beatty continued, he was planning on directing and starring in a biographical movie about Reed and his relationship to Louise Bryant—the Marxist/anarchist and proto-feminist glamour girl of journalism. It’d be an epic of romance, politics, and revolution. He was planning on picking a screenwriter soon, and wanted to know if I was interested. It was between Paddy Chayevsky and me.

At that point the phone rang again. I was relieved; if it hadn’t, I might have fainted. Forget Moses Wine and the horse he rode in on. There was nothing I could have imagined wanting to write more than this, though I knew that Chayevsky—the author of Marty, The Americanization of Emily , and Hospital—meant stiff, probably impossible, competition.

The call turned out to be from Jimmy Carter. That’s how I can recall that this meeting took place in late 1975 to early 1976; Carter was just launching his run for the presidency. I listened as the Southern governor kowtowed and kissed up to the movie star in search of his support, which obviously meant money and a significant endorsement, also entrée into the liberal Hollywood crowd. The name “Jack” was mentioned. Warren seemed to be enjoying the exchange and was acting out a bit for my benefit. This was my first brush with the Hollywood-Washington nexus, which is now a commonplace.

When he hung up, Beatty asked if I thought Carter would make a good president. I don’t remember my answer, but I probably equivocated. (Now I would just snort.) I was far more interested in my own advancement, and I didn’t want to disturb that possibility with any rash statements. Beatty didn’t do much to tip his hand either. As I later learned, that was typical Warren. He played footsie with politicians the same way he played footsie with potential film collaborators (and, needless to say, girlfriends), relishing his power until he made a decision based on a timetable known only to him—and probably not even to him. The same ambivalence has been apparent in his own tentative steps into electoral politics, when he’s been touted for the California governorship or the Senate, and has publicly played with the idea and then backed away. I was never surprised. He is far too much of a control freak to tolerate the hurly-burly of politics, in which it’s highly difficult to regulate your press in the way a movie star of his stature is used to doing. And he was more obsessive about that than most of them. This is a man who definitely only wants to be photographed one way.

To be fair, Warren was the only person on the Hollywood Left who has ever impressed me with his knowledge of radical politics. That’s not necessarily saying much, but he was familiar with the finer points of theory to a degree that would have left most of his entertainment industry colleagues—and probably some college professors—glassy-eyed. I heard years later that his name appears on the checkout list for several arcane texts about socialist history—works on the Third International and such—at Harvard’s Widener Library. Does that mean he really read them? No, but I suspect that he may have while writing Reds, the movie he was dreaming that day we met in the mid-Seventies. Reds, his highly romantic version of the John Reed-Louise Bryant story, finally reached the theaters in 1981, with Warren playing Reed and Diane Keaton as Bryant. Beatty won the Oscar for directing the film. Its Oscar-nominated screenplay is credited to Beatty and British playwright Trevor Griffiths—no Roger Simon or Paddy Chayevsky in sight.

I may have lost my chance at writing it a few days after that first meeting. I received a phone call from Warren out of the blue asking whether my wife and I would like to go out to dinner that night with him and “Michelle.” By Michelle I knew he meant his main squeeze “Mama” Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. Dyanne and I had another engagement that night, to go to a spiritualist “table tapping” (calling forth of ancestors) with our friend the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff. (Barbara apparently believed in such things.) Careerist that I was, I was more than willing to cancel and dine with Warren and Michelle. Dyanne wasn’t, and insisted, for whatever reason, that we honor our obligation to Barbara. I remember fighting about this, claiming that the “table tapping” was nonsense, anyway, but Dyanne wouldn’t relent. Off we went to the tapping, which was, indeed, even sillier than one could imagine. Warren didn’t call me again for several years.

I was with another woman when I first saw Reds in 1981. She was the producer Renee Missel, who would become my second wife. We were at a very romantic point and she thought the Reed-Bryant story was about us, metaphorically, anyway. I don’t know if I was so sure, caught up as I was in very conventional bourgeois feelings of guilt about leaving my first wife and children—though almost all of that guilt was about the children. As for Warren, he, of course, never played Moses Wine. By that time, The Big Fix had already been a successful film starring Richard Dreyfuss.

Considering all the ups and downs of the previous attempts to make a Moses Wine film, the production of Fix, as it was called on the set, came about relatively easily. I’d stayed in touch with Dreyfuss, who’d always wanted to do the character. By 1978 or so, his power in the business had reached the level of a “bankable” actor, someone with so much box office clout that he could pretty much pick his project, as long as it wasn’t a dramatization of the phone book. (With some “bankable” actors, like Beatty in those days, it could be the phone book: “So, Warren, are we talking the Yellow Pages or the White Pages?”) Richard and I got together with his buddy Carl Borack—a commercials producer who would take the lead in the production area—and formed the Moses Wine Company. We took the package to Universal, where Richard had made Jaws, through Verna Fields, the film’s editor, who had gone on to become a studio executive. Verna, everybody’s den mother, passed it on to Ned Tanen, the head of Universal.

It was an easy sell, not only because of Richard but also because Ned identified with Moses Wine. I was at first astonished that a rich and powerful studio chief could identify with a hippie detective living in a working-class and Chicano barrio of LA. But it didn’t take me long to understand that I had created a kind of mirror for people’s counter lives. A studio head was in his soul a down-at-the-heels gumshoe out to buck the system and to save the poor and downtrodden. Never mind that he was experiencing these feelings in a multi-million-dollar ocean-view home in Pacific Palisades, a home adorned with museum-quality Navajo rugs. Ned was married at the time to Kitty Hawks, the daughter of director Howard Hawks and fashion icon Slim Keith (later Lady Keith)—not exactly the company Moses Wine traveled in.

I didn’t realize it then, but I was witnessing one of the first cases I would see of the bifurcated Hollywood personality. In Ned Tanen’s case it was relatively benign, because he had a sense of irony about his position. In many other cases it was far less so.

The studio left me alone with Dreyfuss for the writing of the film. In fact, I was treated remarkably well by them the entire time, contrary to the fables of Hollywood’s cruelty to writers. Part of this was that the star protected me, but it was also because I had written the book and they had heard of it. I wasn’t just a screenwriter. I was a novelist who might not even need them. (I learned to encourage the studio executives’ belief that I earned much more money from my books than I did; it made them insecure about their hold on me. It was a lie, of course. I badly needed the screenwriting money to support my family.)

Even then, novelists in Hollywood were a diminishing number. Most of the writers were film school grads using their screenwriting as a wedge to get a directing assignment. This didn’t make for exceptional writing. It’s not by accident that the films from the Golden Era were better written—many of them by Broadway playwrights.

More surprisingly, the studio didn’t interfere with the film politically, to the extent that the roll-up at the end shows Moses Wine marching off away from camera, his arms around his young children, jocularly teaching them to sing the “Internationale,” as if this were the way any All-American dad would behave. This was never mentioned in any of the reviews—most of which were favorable—nor did anyone at the studio ever speak of it to me or anyone else I know of. It was also never referred to in the numerous market research cards turned in by the audiences in two large preview screenings in San Jose and Denver. Perhaps no one recognized it—or, if they did, they didn’t want to say.

The script was peppered with liberal-left one-liners, including references to the Russian anarchist Bakunin that couldn’t possibly have meant anything to 99.9 percent of the audience. Some of these were added immediately before shooting because Dreyfuss broke his wrist in an accident a month before the start date. We had the choice to shut down and wait until he healed or to write something that would cover his character being a private dick with his arm in a cast. We chose the latter, and I was able to turn this into a plus with some liberal wisecracks Moses makes whenever he’s asked about his fractured arm (“Bar fight with a Bircher”). The truth is revealed at the end: It was just a dopey accident from trying to learn to skateboard from his kids.

Dreyfuss, Jeremy Kagan (the film’s director, brought on pretty late in the game), and I shared the film’s politics—in retrospect, a rather sentimental vision of the Sixties as seen from the late Seventies. One scene shows Dreyfuss looking at television clips of the old days—Chicago 1968—with tears of nostalgia in his eyes. This wasn’t particularly my kind of thing—and I resisted writing it—but it played well with the audience. Much of Hollywood politics is at root sentimental. It’s about feeling good about yourself without having to do much more than sound off—or make a “touching” scene in a movie. My heart (and writing) was even then more in black comic mockery of the Sixties, as in the scene when the Abbie Hoffman-Jerry Rubin character is revealed to have turned very comfortably into a bourgeois ad man while supposedly in hiding as a dangerous underground revolutionary.

Richard, whose father was a socialist, and Jeremy, whose father was a rabbi, were more emotional about those days, although I undoubtedly participated in radical politics more directly than they did. One of the more effective scenes in The Big Fix movie, when Moses goes inside LA County jail to obtain information from the Linkers (Yiddish for “leftists”), a couple based on Bill and Emily Harris of Symbionese Liberation Army fame, came from my own experience with the Harrises only a few years before.